OSI, ODP and distributed applications: towards an integrated approach

The author discusses the use of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) upper layer services and protocols as a base for distributed object-oriented (O-O) systems and applications and integrates the resulting approach with the Open Distributed Processing (ODP) reference model. He outlines how the basic functionality of a distributed O-O system (location independent object invocation and object mobility) can be accomplished in a heterogeneous environment using the OSI communication mechanisms. As a base, an additional object management layer is put on top of the OSI model. The author discusses how the different viewpoints of the ODP model can be covered by this approach. In particular, he proposes linguistic and tool-oriented extensions to the basic approach in order to achieve a broad technical coverage. A resulting integrated language and tool architecture is outlined on the basis of personal implementation experiences