Introducing Java into the teaching of distributed systems

Due to the successful development of the Internet, the course of distributed systems has received great attention by many universities and colleges in their computer science curricula. A comprehensive distributed system course involves many disciplines, such as computer architecture, operating systems, concurrent programming and distributed algorithms. It covers many interesting topics, such as client-server computing, remote procedure calling and distributed database and transaction management systems. These can serve as good topics for a programming or design project of the course. In particular, we have the management of banking accounts a relatively simple but typical problem for such a project. This project involves at least three basic topics of distributed systems: transaction processing, concurrency control, and multithreaded programming. The authors have introduced the Java language into the project, because literature and their experience showed that Java is a good concurrent language. Java's object-oriented paradigm, clean structure and strong support of threads and concurrency make the project even more interesting for students. This paper presents an example of multithreaded, concurrent program in Java for simulating a banking problem. Running the program on a 4-processor SPARCstation-20 symmetric multiprocessor has shown interesting results with a high degree of parallelism and the ACID (Atomic-Consistent-Isolate-Durable) properties of transactions maintained correctly.