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From: fouts@orville.nas.nasa.gov (Marty Fouts)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Distributed Object Oriented Programming
Message-ID: <2916@ames.arpa>
Date: Tue, 29-Sep-87 12:17:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: ames.2916
Posted: Tue Sep 29 12:17:39 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Sep-87 07:22:20 EDT
Sender: usenet@ames.arpa
Reply-To: fouts@orville.nas.nasa.gov.UUCP (Marty Fouts)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA
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(I've just started following this list, so this question may have
 already been beat to death.  If so, I'm sorry ;-))

We have a heterogeneous Unix based network (Cray 2, Amdahls, Vaxen,
Silicon Graphics workstations) and are just begining to do distributed
applications -- mostly the hard way.  Some of my coworkers are
investigating RPC and related issues in standard procedural languages,
and I would like to investigate RPC in message passing systems.

It seems to me that an object oriented message passing language would
be ideal for distribution.  By designing a message passing mechanism
which recognized machine boundries and "filtered" messages to be in an
appropriate form as they cross the boundry, it should be possible to
hide all of the data representation and (network) message passing
details from the programmer.  By implementing a network name space, it
should be possible to export classes, so that instantiations could
occure across network boundries.  These seem to be the two big
problems.

Has anyone done any work in this area?  Can anyone point me to
references before I go reinvent the wheel.  (What I want to do is
distribute SmallTalk between my Cray 2 and an Iris workstation, but
I'm having bureacratic problems with the SmallTalk license which are
too painful to discuss.)

Any help, discussion, or pointers would be appreciated.

Marty