Concurrent Transactions and Communicators: Extensible Synchronization Mechanisms for Distributed Programming
Abstract:
Object-Oriented concurrency model has been recognized as good programming paradigm in concurrent and distributed programming. However, concurrency and synchronization primitives provided by the concurrent object-oriented languages are not expressive enough for complicated communication and synchronization schemes that are required by practical applications. The article proposes a highly extensible computation model that introduces two novel ideas of in concurrent objectoriented computation model: namely transactions and communicators. The concurrent transaction mechanism guarantees collective data integrity of a subcomputation and makes its activity appear atomic relative to the rest of the overall concurrent computation. Thecommunicator is a programmable abstraction of message-basedcommunication protocols. Communicator facilities allow the programmer to add arbitrary communication protocol to the programming language in a seamless manner with respect to the built-in communication primitives. Moreover, by combined use of concurrent transaction and communicators, various atomic communication primitives can be easily developed. A number of examples demonstrate the expressiveness given through these facilities in describing various distributed systems. 1
