Subject:
Review of CP&E C575
From:
vss@mathcs.emory.edu (Vaidy Sunderam)
Date:
Tue, 4 Dec 2001 11:10:28 -0500 (EST)
To:
gcf@indiana.edu

Geoffrey,

Below is my review of the paper you recently sent me
for refereeing; hope it is useful in your editorial
decision.

Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Regards

Vaidy Sunderam
--


Referee's Report - Concurrency: Practice & Experience
=====================================================

Paper No. : C575

Title     : Advanced Concurrency Control in Java

Authors   : Felber and Reiter

Recommendations: Revise and resubmit

Comments:
---------
	The authors propose a Java class library for advanced 
	concurrency control similar to that found in transactional 
	databases. A new primitive is proposed, and both programming
	and efficiency arguments are made as to its merits.
	The paper is well written, although at times the discussion
	is at a textbook level. I would encourage the authors to
	reduce the content in sections 2 and 4 considerably.
	Further, it might be useful to point out existing pragmatic
	solutions to the problems they highlight. For example, the
	banking example in Section 2 is easily solved in practice
	by imposing an ordering based on, say, the account number.
	Similarly, binary semaphores can be easily used to circumvent
	the limitations of the "synchronized" statement. Conversely,
	interesting issues such as the point about maintaining
	fine-grained concurrency in in-memory data structures (sec 4)
	should be expanded further. The rigor in sections 4 and 5
	is commendable and adds significant strength to the paper.
	Although impressed by its technical soundness, I am a little 
	bothered by the implementation approach, in particular the
	use of proxy objects that can obfuscate code, and be
	counterproductive to the goals of "reducing the burden on 
	the developer". It would be instructive to expand on
	the potential programming pitfalls, e.g. similar to the
	mention of exception handling contexts, and to make a stronger
	case for language modification in 5.5. Section 6 is
	very good and adds significant weight to the paper. Nevertheless,
	I am uncomfortable with recommending acceptance in its
	present form; my primary reservation is my suspicion
	that all that is described in the paper can be accomplished
	via semaphores. If this issue, and the other minor details
	mentioned above can be satisfactorily addressed, I believe
	this work would make a substantial impact and contribution.