A Meta-Object Protocol for Distributed OO Applications

The design of complex distributed objects applications such as transactional systems (e.g. nested transactions , two or three phases commit protocols), network algorithms (e.g. routing, spanning tree construction , group causal delivery) or cooperative applications is a hard task. In this paper we present a meta-object protocol (MOP for short) called CAO-LAC, to assist developers in implementing these applications. A prototype was developed for the language of the GUIDE distributed object system. The MOP uses a state/transition approach to synchronize concurrent objects. We propose some extensions to manage intra-object parallelism. Then we report on a spanning tree construction algorithm that was implemented with this MOP.