ylfink@water.UUCP (11/13/87)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
COMPUTER SYSTEMS SEMINAR
- Thursday, November 19, 1987
Dr. John K. Bennett, of the University of Washington,
will speak on ``The Design and Implementation of
Distributed Smalltalk''.
TIME: 3:30 PM
ROOM: MC 6082
ABSTRACT
Smalltalk is a uniformly object-structured language and
highly interactive programming environment originally
developed for the Xerox family of personal
workstations. The Smalltalk programming environment
supports a single user on a single processor in a
single object address space. Distributed Smalltalk
extends the Smalltalk system to support the interaction
of many users on many machines. It provides
communication and interaction among geographically
remote Smalltalk users, direct access to remote
objects, the ability to construct distributed
applications in the Smalltalk environment, and a degree
of object sharing among users. Applications of
Distributed Smalltalk include mail systems, remote
computation servers, remote file servers, and
collaborative software development.
The distributed aspects of the system are largely user
transparent and preserve the reactive quality of
Smalltalk objects. The naming mechanism employed in
Distributed Smalltalk imposes zero cost on local
operations. Distributed Smalltalk is currently
operational on a network of Sun workstations. The
implementation includes an incremental distributed
garbage collector and support for remote debugging,
access control, and object mobility. The talk will
concentrate on the important design issues encountered
and some of the more interesting implementation
details. Performance measurements of the current
implementation will be presented.