fouts@orville.nas.nasa.gov (Marty Fouts) (09/29/87)
(I've just started following this list, so this question may have already been beat to death. If so, I'm sorry ;-)) We have a heterogeneous Unix based network (Cray 2, Amdahls, Vaxen, Silicon Graphics workstations) and are just begining to do distributed applications -- mostly the hard way. Some of my coworkers are investigating RPC and related issues in standard procedural languages, and I would like to investigate RPC in message passing systems. It seems to me that an object oriented message passing language would be ideal for distribution. By designing a message passing mechanism which recognized machine boundries and "filtered" messages to be in an appropriate form as they cross the boundry, it should be possible to hide all of the data representation and (network) message passing details from the programmer. By implementing a network name space, it should be possible to export classes, so that instantiations could occure across network boundries. These seem to be the two big problems. Has anyone done any work in this area? Can anyone point me to references before I go reinvent the wheel. (What I want to do is distribute SmallTalk between my Cray 2 and an Iris workstation, but I'm having bureacratic problems with the SmallTalk license which are too painful to discuss.) Any help, discussion, or pointers would be appreciated. Marty
crowl@cs.rochester.edu (Lawrence Crowl) (09/30/87)
In article <2916@ames.arpa> fouts@orville.nas.nasa.gov.UUCP (Marty Fouts) writes: >It seems to me that an object oriented message passing language would >be ideal for distribution. Has anyone done any work in this area? I couldn't get mail to you, so I'll shout. Write to the University of Washington Computer Science Department and ask for everything they've got on Eden, Emerald, and their heterogeneous network stuff. Eden is an operating system and Emerald is a programming language. Both are distributed and object-oriented. Another thing you should look at is the Argus system from MIT. Barbara Liskov is the primary person behind this work. It is a distributed extension to (or environment for) the object-oriented CLU programming language. These should give you a start. Good luck. -- Lawrence Crowl 716-275-9499 University of Rochester crowl@cs.rochester.edu Computer Science Department ...!{allegra,decvax,rutgers}!rochester!crowl Rochester, New York, 14627
jans@tekchips.TEK.COM (Jan Steinman) (09/30/87)
<<<It seems to me that an object oriented message passing language would be ideal for distribution... Has anyone done any work in this area? Can anyone point me to references before I go reinvent the wheel.>>> Most *real work* that I am familiar with has been done by Dave Thomas, et. al. at Carleton University. (I don't mean to slight others, but Dave's stuff is actually running and apparently usefully so!) He came to Tek and gave a talk a few weeks ago that set us all on fire! There are about a dozen papers that should be available through Carleton. There are also a few papers in the OOPSLA `86 proceedings, available through ACM (ACM order #548861), and I see at least one or two that may be applicable in the program for OOPSLA `87, which happens next week. Sources: David A. Thomas, School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6. Association for Computing Machinery, 11 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036. <<<(What I want to do is distribute SmallTalk between my Cray 2 and an Iris workstation, but I'm having bureacratic problems with the SmallTalk license which are too painful to discuss.)>>> And you aren't even trying to sell it! Tell us about it! :::::: Software Productivity Technologies --- Smalltalk Project :::::: :::::: Jan Steinman N7JDB Box 500, MS 50-470 (w)503/627-5881 :::::: :::::: jans@tekcrl.TEK.COM Beaverton, OR 97077 (h)503/657-7703 ::::::
dar@telesoft.UUCP (David Reisner @telesoft) (10/01/87)
> It seems to me that an object oriented message passing language would > be ideal for distribution. I believe that a group at Xerox PARC is working on this (and has been for some time) as part of their extended/remote office work. -David sdcsvax!telesoft!dar
verber@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber) (10/02/87)
A number of langauges which would be good for distributed oo programming are described in the book Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming editted by Akinori Yonezawa and Mario Tokoro. It is in the Computer Systems Series published by MIT Press. Cheers, ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Science Department Mark A. Verber The Ohio State University verber@ohio-state.arpa +1 (614) 292-7344 cbosgd!osu-eddie!verber
gore@nucsrl.UUCP (10/03/87)
><<<It seems to me that an object oriented message passing language would be >ideal for distribution... Has anyone done any work in this area? Can anyone >point me to references before I go reinvent the wheel.>>> I haven't read this book yet, but it seems appropriate: Akinori Yonezawa and Mario Tokoro, ed. Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987. Contents: Akinori Yonezawa & Mario Tokoro. Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming: An Introduction. Henry Lieberman. Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming in Act 1. Gul Agha and Carl Hewitt. Concurrent Programming Using Actors. Akinori Yonezawa, Etsuya Shibayama, Toshihiro Takada and Yasuaki Honda. Modelling and Programming in an Object-Oriented Concurrent Language ABCL/1. Etsuya Shibayama aand Akinori Yonezawa. Distributed Computing in ABCL/1. Yasuhico Yokote and Mario Tokoro. Concurrent Programming in ConcurrentSmalltalk. Yutaka Ishikawa and Mario Tokoro. Orient84/K: An Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming Language for Knowledge Representation. Pierre America. POOL-T: A Parallel Object-Oriented Language. Pierre Cointe, Jean-Pierre Briot and Bernard Serpette. The Formes System: A Musical Application of Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming. Giuseppe Attardi. Concurrent Strategy Execution in Omega. Phew... It's amazing how much harder it is to type names that are not mnemonic to you :-) Jacob Gore gore@EECS.NWU.Edu Northwestern Univ., EECS Dept. {gargoyle,ihnp4,chinet}!nucsrl!gore
eugene@pioneer.UUCP (10/03/87)
In article <302@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> verber@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber) writes: >the book Object-Oriented Concurrent >Programming editted by Akinori Yonezawa and Mario Tokoro. My secretary keyed in the refer for the articles in this book. If I get two YEA's in mail, I will post it. I'm not overly impressed, but if you see the contents you might think otherwise. I purchased it on US Government money. Rarely MY money. From the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers: --eugene miya NASA Ames Research Center eugene@ames-aurora.ARPA "You trust the `reply' command with all those different mailers out there?" "Send mail, avoid follow-ups. If enough, I'll summarize." {hplabs,hao,ihnp4,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!eugene