Distributed Objects

One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell’s work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Engineering Distributed Objects, EDO 2000, held in November 2000 in Davis, California, USA. The 15 revised full papers presented together with session surveys were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The book presents topical sections on middleware selection, resource management, architectural reasoning, distributed communication, advanced transactions, and service integration.

Coordinating Distributed Objects presents a novel object-oriented methodology to simplify the construction of distributed software systems. The methodology is based on a programming construct, called synchronizer, that allows the coordination of distributed application components to be programmed in a modular fashion and at a high level of abstraction. The methodology offers new insight into the problem of coordination in distributed systems and can be applied to a broad spectrum of distributed software systems such as process control, multimedia, and groupware. Current methodologies for developing distributed applications do not adequately address the complexity of coordinating application components. The coherence between asynchronous application components, for instance, is usually implemented by explicitly programming a large number of messages and the responses to them. The synchronizer construct, however, implements coordination as abstract and reusable coordination constraints, and thereby reduces code size and complexity by an order of magnitude. Synchronizers offer other attractions as well: they maintain procedural abstraction, data encapsulation, and inherent concurrency. Overall, they allow coordination to be expressed at a level of abstraction that is much closer to the mental model of code developers.

Distributed and communicating objects are becoming ubiquitous. In global, Grid and Peer-to-Peer computing environments, extensive use is made of objects interacting through method calls. So far, no general formalism has been proposed for the foundation of such systems. Caromel and Henrio are the first to define a calculus for distributed objects interacting using asynchronous method calls with generalized futures, i.e., wait-by-necessity -- a must in large-scale systems, providing both high structuring and low coupling, and thus scalability. The authors provide very generic results on expressiveness and determinism, and the potential of their approach is further demonstrated by its capacity to cope with advanced issues such as mobility, groups, and components. Researchers and graduate students will find here an extensive review of concurrent languages and calculi, with comprehensive figures and summaries. Developers of distributed systems can adopt the many implementation strategies that are presented and analyzed in detail. Preface by Luca Cardelli

This book is a comprehensive guide to Java distributed computing. The book covers networking, distributed computing architectures, advanced Java facilities, security, data managing, and specific distributed computing techniques including sockets, Remote Method Invocation, Java servlets, Microsoft's Distributed Component Model, and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture.

Distributed Object Architectures with CORBA is a guide to designing software comprised of distributed components. While it is based on OMG's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard, the principles also apply to architecture built with other technology (such as Microsoft's DCOM). As ORB products evolve to incorporate new additions to CORBA, the knowledge and experience required to build stable and scalable systems is not widespread. With this volume the reader can develop the skills and knowledge that are necessary for building such systems. The book assumes a familiarity with object-oriented concepts and the basics of CORBA. Software developers who are new to building systems with CORBA-based technologies will find this a useful guide to effective development.

Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems presents the leading edge in several related fields, specifically object-orientated programming, open distributed systems and formal methods for object-oriented systems. With increased support within industry regarding these areas, this book captures the most up-to-date information on the subject. Many topics are discussed, including the following important areas: object-oriented design and programming; formal specification of distributed systems; open distributed platforms; types, interfaces and behaviour; formalisation of object-oriented methods. This volume comprises the proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Methods for Open Object-based Distributed Systems (FMOODS), sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) which was held in Florence, Italy, in February 1999. Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems is suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level courses in computer science and telecommunications, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Engineering Distributed Objects, EDO 2000, held in November 2000 in Davis, California, USA.The 15 revised full papers presented together with session surveys were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The book presents topical sections on middleware selection, resource management, architectural reasoning, distributed communication, advanced transactions, and service integration.