A meta-object protocol for distributed OO applications

The design of complex distributed object applications such as transactional systems (e.g. nested transactions, two or three phase commit protocols), network algorithms (e.g. routing, spanning tree construction, group causal delivery) or cooperative applications is a hard task. We present a meta-object protocol (MOP) called CAO-LAC, to assist developers in implementing these applications. A prototype was developed for the language of the GUIDE distributed object system. The MOP uses a state/transition approach to synchronize concurrent objects. We propose some extensions to manage intra-object parallelism. Then we report on a spanning tree construction algorithm that was implemented with this MOP