Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!unido!laura!exunido!guendel
From: guendel@exunido.uucp (Andreas Guendel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Access Protection in Distributed Smalltalk
Summary: Opinions?
Message-ID: <996@laura.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 89 12:49:33 GMT
Sender: root@laura.UUCP
Reply-To: guendel@exunido.UUCP (Andreas Guendel)
Organization: University of Dortmund, W-Germany
Lines: 29

In an adaptation of his PhD-thesis John K. Bennett has published
the report "Distributed Smalltalk: Inheritance and Reactiveness
in Distributed Systems". There he writes:

>  We believed that too significant a departure from the
>  protection free Smalltalk environment would be poorly
>  received by users.

As I have thought a lot about integrating flexible mechanisms of
access protection into my prototypical distributed extension of
ParcPlace-Smalltalk, I would be interested into your opinions.

-  Do you think that Smalltalk will envetually build a basis for
   a distributed multi-user commercial application?

-  Do you think that this user may have different capabilities
   to access each other's objects?

-  Do you think that access protection should be integrated into
   a distributed Smalltalk System or into the applications?

-  ... Any other related questions.

Please mail your answers directly to

guendel@unido.uucp                               or
guendel@exunido.irb.informatik.uni-dortmund.de

I will post a summary if there is enough interest.