A Reflective Implementation of a Distributed Programming Model

Abstract

This paper presents a reflective programming scheme approach for distributed algorithms such as traversal networks or distributed global state algorithms. This model proposes several extensions designed to ease the programming of distributed applications. It extends the object programming elements such as types, classes, instantiation or, algorithmic statements. It is implemented with a framework based on a run-time metaobject protocol written with Open C++ v2. 1 Introduction Programming environments such as CORBA [OMG95] or DCOM [Gri97] associated with an object-oriented language such as C++ or Java provide some basic mechanisms to invoke remote objects methods and to accept dynamic bindings in an open universe. This classical model allows to easily write distributed client/server applications. Our project is to extend this model toward a distributed algorithmic model where the distributed application is a program that is processed by a group of objects. We define six design concepts...