Abstract
The use of class inheritance provides many benefits when developing information based systems. The use of class inheritance within a distributed object information system (DOIS) however, has failed to gain acceptance within the distributed community. One of the major reasons for this is the general acceptance of the widely held belief [19] that inheritance is said to unacceptably degrade the performance of a DOIS. This widely held belief arose from the analysis of Smalltalk and its use in a distributed system. We argue that newer object-oriented languages such as Eiffel and Java use more efficient mechanisms to implement object-oriented features including inheritance. Also, more efficient mechanisms exist for supporting distribution which have changed the distributed inheritance situation. The development of the network techniques such as RPC, CORBA and RMI provide improved support for DOIS. This paper presents an examination of the use of CORBA, RMI and RPC with regard to the performance overheads that arise from moving data from one machine to another. The analysis examines the additional effort that is required in order to support distributed class inheritance. Each aspect of distribution, such as marshalling, binding, network latency and inter-process communication was measured in order to establish the reasons for such degradation. Our results show that the poor performance which is associated with the use of class inheritance within a DOIS, is mainly a result of the inefficiency of the support provided by a language and the unacceptable degradation is not a direct consequence of distribution. Furthermore, our study shows that network techniques such as CORBA and RMI although providing a high level of abstraction, are generally not efficient when large amounts of data are being sent across the network.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baker S., “CORBA Distributed Objects Using Orbix”, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-92475-7
Bennett J., “Distributed Smalltalk: Inheritance and Reactiveness in Distributed Systems”, PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Washington, December 1987
Betz, M.,“Networking Objects with CORBA”, Dr Dobbs Journal, November 1995
Clip P., “IIOP: The Next HTTP?”, BYTE Magazine, January 1998
Costa J., Sernadas A., Sernadas C.,“Object Inheritance beyond Subtyping”, Acta Informatica, Vol. 31,No.1, January 1994
Curtis D., “White Paper on Java RMI and CORBA”, Object Management Group, January 1997
Flannagan G., “Java in a Nutshell“, 2nd Edition, O’Reilly Associates, 1996, ISBN: 1-56592-262-X
Hughes, M., et al., “Java Network Programming”, Prentice-Hall, 1997, ISBN 0-13-841206-5
Leavens G.,“Inheritance of Interface Specification”, ACM Sigplan Notices, vol. 29,no.8, August 1994
Malenfant J., “On the Semantic Diversity of Delegation based Programming languages”, Proceedings of OOPSLA’95, Austin USA, 1995
Matsuoka S., Yonezawa A., “Analysis of Inheritance Anomaly in Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming Languages”, Research Directions in COOP, Chapter 1, pages 107–150. MIT Press 1993
Otte R., Patrick P., Roy M., “Understanding CORBA, The Common Object Request Broker Architecture”, Prentice-hall, 1996, ISBN:0-13-459884-9
Rine D., “Eiffel: A CASE tool supporting object-oriented software”, ACM Sigsoft, Software Engineering Notes, vol. 17,no.1, January 1992
Snyder A., “Open Systems for Software: An Object-Oriented Solution”, ACM OOPS Messenger, Addendum to the Proceddings of OOPSLA 1993, pp67–68, April 1994
Sun Microsystems Inc., “External Data Representation Protocol Specification”, Sun Microsystems, 1986
Tay B., Arianda A., “A Survey of Remote Procedure calls”, ACM Sigplan Notices, October 1992
Venners B., “Inheritance versus Composition: Which should you Choose”, JavaWorld, Vol. 3,No. 1, 1998
Vinoski S., “New Features of CORBA 3.0”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 41,No.10, October 1998
Wegner, P.,“Concepts and Paradigms of Object-oriented programming”, Proceedings of OOPSLA’90 conference, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, June 1990
Wolczko, A.,“Encapsulation, Delegation and Inheritance in object-oriented languages”, Software Engineering Journal, March 1992
Yourst M., “Inside Java Class Files”, Dr. Dobb’s Journal”, January 1998
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dunne, P., Gray, A. (1999). The Impact of Using Class Inheritance in a Distributed Information System. In: Eder, J., Rozman, I., Welzer, T. (eds) Advances in Databases and Information Systems. ADBIS 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1691. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48252-0_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48252-0_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-66485-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48252-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive