SFB 378 Einstiegsseite Postscript File BibTeX Entry

C
NEP

Mobile Objects in Distributed Oz

Author: Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi and Per Brand and Gert Smolka and Michael Mehl and Ralf Scheidhauer

Editor:

Some of the most difficult questions to answer when designing a distributed application are related to mobility: what information to transfer between sites and when and how to transfer it. Network-transparent distribution, the property that a program's behavior is independent of how it is partitioned among sites, does not directly address these questions. Therefore we propose to extend all language entities with a network behavior that enables efficient distributed programming by giving the programmer a simple and predictable control over network communication patterns. In particular, we show how to give objects an arbitrary mobility behavior that is independent of the object's definition. In this way, the syntax and semantics of objects are the same regardless of whether they are used as stationary servers, mobile agents, or simply as caches. These ideas have been implemented in Distributed Oz, a concurrent object-oriented language that is state aware and has data flow synchronization. We prove that the implementation of objects in Distributed Oz is network transparent. To satisfy the predictability condition, the implementation avoids forwarding chains through intermediate sites. The implementation is an extension to the publicly available DFKI Oz 2.0 system.

SFB 378 Einstiegsseite Postscript File BibTeX Entry