JASP: A Framework for Integrating Answer Set Programming with Java

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a fully-declarative logic programming paradigm, which has been proposed in the area of knowledge representation and non-monotonic reasoning. Nowadays, the formal properties of ASP are well-understood, efficient ASP systems are available, and, recently, ASP has been employed in a few industrial applications. However, ASP technology is not mature for a successful exploitation in industry yet; mainly because ASP technologies are not integrated in the well-assessed development processes and platforms which are tailored for imperative/object-oriented programming languages. In this paper we present a new programming framework blending ASP with Java. The framework is based on JASP, an hybrid language that transparently supports a bilateral interaction between ASP and Java. JASP specifications are compliant with the JPA standard to perfectly fit extensively-adopted enterprise application technologies. The framework also encompasses an implementation of JASP as a plug-in for the Eclipse platform, called JDLV, which includes a compiler from JASP to Java. Moreover, we show a real-world application developed with JASP and JDLV, which highlights the effectiveness of our ASP–Java integration framework.