An event based object model for distributed programming

Abstract

This paper describes the rationale and design of a new distributed systems programming model based on events, constraints, and objects 1 . The paper describes the inter-object communication or invocation mechanism, and the way in which concurrency, synchronisation, and timing properties are expressed and controlled. The invocation mechanism is unusual in that it is event-based. It encourages loose coupling among the objects and a high degree of encapsulation for each object. Concurrency, synchronisation, and timing properties are expressed in a uniform way using constraints which may be associated with objects and events. KEY WORDS: events, constraints, inter-object communication mechanism, object-oriented programming 1 Introduction It is well known that large parallel and distributed applications are hard to program, [39], with communication, synchronisation, and timing contributing to the complexity of the task.