网构软件研究:回顾与展望

Research on internetware:Review and prospect

软件作为计算系统的“灵魂”,是信息技术产业的核心组成部分,也正在成为数字经济时代支撑社会运行的重要“基础设施”.进入21世纪以来,互联网及其延伸网络形成了开放、动态、难控的复杂计算环境,对传统的软件范型与技术提出了巨大挑战,也蕴含了技术体系重大变革的新机遇.来自北京大学、南京大学和中国科学院的学者于2000年提出“网构软件”这一面向互联网的新型软件范型,经过20余年的努力,在其基本模型、开发方法、运行支撑和质量评估与保障等方面,均取得一系列重要的研究进展,形成了系统化的创新成果,产生了广泛的学术和产业影响.本文从软件范型入手,以互联网及其延伸网络形成的复杂计算环境为线索,回顾网构软件的研究进展,并展望未来的研究工作.

Software is the core component of IT industry and an important“infrastructure”that supports social operations in the digital economy era.Since the 21st century,the internet has evolved into a global ubiquitous computing environment and open platform.Its open,dynamic,and uncontrollable nature requires the corresponding changes in the basic form and characteristics of software,the conceptual framework,and the logical connotation,and thus leads to substantial challenges to software theory,methods,and technologies.In 2000,researchers from China proposed the term“internetware”,which indicates a new software paradigm for the internet computing.After more than 20 years of efforts,a series of important research achievements have been made in aspects of the basic model,development methodology,runtime support,quality assessment and assurance of internetware,and resulted in systematic innovation results and produced a wide range of academic and industrial impacts.In internetware,the software model consists of a set of autonomous software entities distributed and/or decentralized over the internet and other extensions like internet of things and 4G/5G,together with a set of connectors for enabling collaborations among these entities in various ways.Internetware software entities are able to sense dynamic changes of the underlying environments,and continuously adapt to these changes by means of structural and behavioral maintenance and evolution.From the micro perspective,internetware software entities collaborate with each other on demand and on the fly.From the macro perspective,the entities can self-organize to form an application or community of interest and even decentralized autonomous organizations.As a result,the development and evolution of a software application with internetware can be viewed as continuous and iterative composition of various“disordered”resources into“ordered”software applications.Thus,software development with internetware is a process being bottomup,inside-out,spiral,and to some extent,similar with the complex adaptive systems.For example,the internetware paradigm proposed the theory of software architecture modeling(called ABC methodology)covering the whole life-cycle,where the core artifacts and activities of every single stage are unified into the software architecture model and its iterative refinement and transformation.In this way,the internetware paradigm greatly improves the efficiency and quality of software development and evolution.In addition,the internetware paradigm expands the software architecture from the development phase to the runtime,by proposing the concept of runtime software architecture(RSA).The RSA has been widely applied for a large number of information“silo”systems to enable the functionality and data interoperability.This solution is a significantly disruptive technical invention,or namely the“black box”mode,based on the client-driven resource reflection mechanism to achieve automatic recovery of the system runtime architecture and automatic generation of data access interfaces.Compared to the traditional“white box”interoperability solution,the internetware paradigm eliminates the need of accessing source code,documentation,and original development team,and improves the interoperability efficiency between information silos,with more than 100X acceleration.This article reviews the research and practice of internetware from the perspective of software paradigm,following the internet computing environment and its extensions as a clue.It also discusses the future research outlook of internetware,especially for the ubiquitous computing environments and data centric technologies.