Software engineering in distributed systems-approaches and issues

The author reports on issues of development support for distributed applications, that is applications intended to run cooperatively on a distributed system. Emphasis is put on the issues arising from the distributed nature of such software and on the use of object-oriented techniques. The author bases his discussion on the experiences gained with the development of two experimental software engineering environments (each including a dedicated distributed programming language). The first software engineering environment, called DESIGN, includes a distributed extension to C, called DC. DESIGN is operational and is currently used to develop sample distributed applications. A second project, DOCASE, introduces the object-oriented paradigm into the approaches discussed. DOCASE is based on a design-oriented language called DODL and is still under construction