Systems support for future distributed object-oriented environments

Distributed applications tend to be large and complex and hence it is vitally important to provide good tools to aid the distributed software development process. This concern has resulted in an increasing interest in the perceived benefits of the object-oriented approach. There are significant challenges on the horizon for distributed object-oriented environments. For example, new networking and workstation technologies are making distributed multimedia applications a reality. At the other end of the performance spectrum, advances in radio communications are making mobile computing possible. It is therefore important that distributed object-oriented environments can adapt to meet the requirements of these new classes of applications. The author provides a brief overview of research at Lancaster on meeting future challenges for distributed object-oriented environments. This work is carried out in the context of emerging standards for ODP. However, the results apply to other object-oriented environments such as the CORBA work of OMG