Eos, an environment for object-based systems

Complex data-intensive application domains require a programming environment that should be both more productive and more efficient than the traditional approaches. This translates into three major requirements: efficient support for complex, persistent objects and collections; distribution transparency with control over parallelism; and transaction management. The authors present the design of Eos which aims at reducing the chronic mismatch between programming languages and database systems and avoiding the traditional redundancy between operating systems and database systems services. The main contributions of Eos are support for: uniform, distributed object management; safe object sharing with distributed, low-overhead garbage collection; and high-level mechanisms for dynamic object grouping and computation placement. Eos is currently being implemented on a network of Sun 3/60 _s running Mach 3.0