Supporting the development of network programs

Programmers who want to do network computing face several challenges: the network and attached systems are shared resources with an unpredictable behavior and network communication primitives are often hard to use. The programming environment developed for the Nectar system addresses both problems. It provides simple and efficient communication primitives, and an efficient monitoring kernel that allows both programmers and programming tools to monitor the behavior of the program in the dynamic network environment. Experience shows that monitoring the progress of applications interactively is both desirable and practical