DO-OPEN: a distributed object-oriented programming environment

The paper discusses the key aspects and presents the preliminary version of an object oriented programming environment, designed to support distributed applications in heterogeneous, networked Unix systems. Main characteristics of this environment are: usage of Unix based industry standard software tools and components; definition of a simple, C++ like syntax, to facilitate usability and readability of the distributed code; implementation of a light weight run time support, adopting PVM as the base engine. The paper outlines the rationale behind the design of such a programming environment, and discusses in detail the solution adopted to remotise interacting objects. In particular, a simple solution for allowing parallel execution of remotised objects is presented. Performance evaluations are currently being carried out