Structuring Concurrent Applications Using Active Expressions

The paper presents the concept of Active Expressions and describes a model, called A e , for structuring concurrent applications. Relying solely on the features of an object oriented language, A e allows deenition of common communication and synchronization patterns. These patterns are then combined with the user provided application code to instantiate complete concurrent applications. The approach has two novel aspects: First, it demonstrates that common patterns of concurrency can be expressed using language provided facilities. Second, the model can be implemented without requiring any complex user-interfaces, preprocessing stages or language extensions. Finally, the use of the pattern based approach for developing concurrent applications is illustrated via an example. The model has been implemented using C++/Unix on shared-memory as well as distributed memory based platforms.