Views are known mechanisms for controlling access of data and for sharing data of different schemas. Despite long and intensive research on views in both the database community and the programming language community, we are facing difficulties to use views in practice. The main reason is that we lack ways to directly describe view update strategies to deal with the inherent ambiguity of view updating. This paper aims to provide a new language-based approach to controlling and sharing distributed data based on views, and establish a software foundation for systematic construction of such data management systems. Our key observation is that a view should be defined through a view update strategy rather than a view definition. We show that Datalog can be used for specifying view update strategies whose unique view definition can be automatically derived, present a novel P2P-based programmable architecture for distributed data management where updatable views are fully utilized for controlling and sharing distributed data, and demonstrate its usefulness through the development of a privacy-preserving ride-sharing alliance system.