Abstract
By means of an illustrative application, we discuss the implementation choices of the rule-based coordination language LO.
Distributed applications written in LO manifest two levels of granularity, each with their specific communication paradigm. At the finer level, individual objects are composed into agents and communicate through blackboards. At the coarser level, these agents interact through broadcasts.
This dichotomy determines implementation choices: Concurrency among agents naturally maps onto distributed processes (with e.g. RPC), whereas concurrency among objects maps onto threads (in shared memory). These four abstractions (objects, blackboards, agents, and broadcasts) together with LO's basic computation paradigm (rules) are implemented as a class-based run-time library, thereby enriching classical object-oriented platforms.
Finally we stress the fact that the resulting run-time library is polymorphic: The run-time can manipulate any independently defined application object, provided its class respects a minimal protocol. Run-time polymorphism has turned out to be the key to composition-based reuse.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Bourgois, M., Andreoli, J.M., Pareschi, R. (1994). Concurrency and communication: Choices in implementing the coordination language LO . In: Guerraoui, R., Nierstrasz, O., Riveill, M. (eds) Object-Based Distributed Programming. ECOOP 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 791. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017535
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017535
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