tuProlog: A Light-weight Prolog for Internet Applications and Infrastructures

Intelligence and interaction are two key-issues in the engineering of today complex systems, like Internet-based ones. To make logic languages accomplish their vocation of sound enabling technologies for intelligent components, we first need their implementations to strictly meet some engineering properties such as deployability, configurability, and scalability. Then, we should provide them with a wide range of interaction capabilities, according to standards and common practices. This would make logic-based systems also viable tools to build deployable, configurable, dynamic, and possibly intelligent infrastructures.

In this paper, we present tuProlog, a light-weight Java-based system allowing configurable and scalable Prolog components to be built and integrated into standard Internet applications according to a multiplicity of different interaction patterns, like JavaBeans, RMI, CORBA, and TCP/IP. Even more, tuProlog offers basic coordination capabilities in terms of logic tuple spaces, which allow complex Internet-based architectures to be designed and governed. This makes it possible to use tuProlog as the core enabling technology for Internet infrastructures — as in the case of the TuCSoN and LuCe infrastructures for the coordination of Internet-based multi-agent systems.