Object-Oriented White Papers

Multithreading, Distribution and Internet Programming Can be Easy

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• object-oriented,
• article,
• programming,
• object

Overview There is also no need to state what concurrent architecture you are using. Concurrent programming comes in many flavors. What gets many people excited these days is multithreading, and indeed the philosophers and forks in this example can be assigned to threads on a multithreaded operating system. But why limit ourselves to multithreading? Threads share many properties with processes; we can use exactly the same model to describe concurrent execution of processes running on the same machine. Then again why limit ourselves to one machine? The processes can be on different computers on a local network. Why a local network? A process can be running in Santa Barbara and one in Tokyo, communicating through the Internet. Or they can be on a company's network, one of the process managing a client workstation and the other a database server (say).
Indeed the model sketched in this article will cover all these forms of concurrency, from multithreading to client-server computing to distributed processing to Internet programming. You will design your application as a network of concurrent objects, and decide separately how to map the virtual concurrency to the concurrent resources physically available.
The rest of this article describes how simple it is to extend the object-oriented paradigm, as illustrated by Eiffel, to cover all the principal variants of concurrent computation. We hope you will be struck by how gracefully object technology lends itself to the programming of concurrent applications.

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