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From: murali@catamaran.cis.ohio-state.edu (S Muralidharan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.sw.components
Subject: Re: Handling objects in a distributed system
Message-ID: <58310@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 23 Aug 89 13:58:44 GMT
Reply-To: <murali@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Followup-To: comp.lang.ada
Distribution: usa
Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Vladmir G. Ivanovic writes:

>>Ed Berard poses an issue in dealing with objects in a distributed 
>>system:  how to send an object to another node.  
>>...

>Maybe there is something I'm missing, but why on earth would one want
>to send an object to another node?  Isn't it like passing an array to
>a procedure?  Why not just pass the name of the object?  In a truly
>distributed system, the name server will provide the access path.
>Then there is only one copy and no consistency problem.


	A very good question. In fact, in the context of reusable software
there are several problems with any object movement. 
	Any approach which advocates object movement generally assumes
that a single person is both the developer and a client of a
component. This assumption is certainly invalid, if software reuse
is based on component specifications and not source code, 
as done in Ada. While only the developers know the details of the software, 
only the clients know the nature of the hardware architecture where 
the software would be executed.
	We have proposed an approach to distributing programs built
from reusable software components whereby most short-lived objects
are never moved. Details of this work can be found in the following
technical report:

S. Muralidharan and B. W. Weide, On Distributing Programs Built from
Reusable Software Components, Technical Report OSU-CISRC-11/88-TR36,
Department of Computer Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, 
OH 43210, November 1988.

	If you are interested in getting a copy of the report, please
send me mail to murali@cis.ohio-state.edu.

Cheers,

Murali

PS: I am cross-posting this article to comp.sw.components.