Object groups and group communication in a distributed object-oriented programming

Groups and group communication are powerful abstractions that offer many benefits to programmers in distributed computing environments. Nevertheless only a few object-oriented programming languages or systems support these kinds of abstractions. In this paper we introduce a framework into DOOCE for handling multiple number of objects as a group and accessing it with group communication. DOOCE is our distributed computing environment which aims to integrate an object-oriented programming language and a distributed computing environment. With DOOCE, programmers can utilize object groups briefly and effectively in a program. Groups can be represented by object lists or Group classes which are added to DOOCE to use abstractions of groups. All messages to groups are transmitted by group communication. To hide consistency problems among group messages from the programmer DOOCE runtime system indivisibly delivers these messages, and messages can also be delivered atomically DOOCE also provides some methods to receive multiple replies from a group in order to ease description for acceptance of replies