Generic Distribution Support for Programming Systems

Erik Klintskog

A Dissertation submitted to
the Royal Institute of Technology
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Technology
Stockholm, Sweden 2005

The Royal Institute of Technology
School of Information and Communication Technology
Department of Electronics and Computer Systems<

Abstract

This dissertation provides constructive proof, through the implementation of a middleware, that distribution transparency is practical, generic, and extensible. Fault tolerant distributed services can be developed by using the failure detection abilities of the middleware. By generic we mean that the middleware can be used for many different programming languages and paradigms. Distribution for each kind of language entity is done in terms of consistency protocols, which guarantee that the semantics of the entities are preserved in a distributed setting. The middleware allows new consistency protocols to be added easily. The efficiency of the middleware and the ease of integration are shown by coupling the middleware to a programming system, which encompasses the object oriented, the functional, and the concurrent-declarative programming paradigms. Our measurements show that the distribution middleware is competitive with the most popular distributed programming systems (JavaRMI, .NET, IBM CORBA).

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Short version (papers excluded) phd.pdf.

Long version (papers appended) phd.pdf.