"Ball", the Byzantine Askemos Language Layer,
is an intrusion resistant and incorruptible,
autonomous distributed operating system.
It provides application programmers with
continuations, messages, and rights management
on top of a peer-to-peer network resisting byzantine failures of network nodes. The API significantly raises the level of abstraction in comparison with other operating systems: there are very few system calls, and these are expressed in XML. An alternative understanding of Askemos is that of an XML object database with stored procedures.