Design and evaluation of a distributed object-oriented communication system for EMS application development

The author describes an architecture for implementing electronic meeting system (EMS) applications in an object-oriented programming (OOP) environment (C++). EMS applications enable group tasks such as negotiation, problem solving, and system design to be performed. The OO-EMS architecture is a three tier structure having layers for base classes, tools, and applications. The design addresses concurrency control, addressing, duplicated objects, and broadcast communications. Implementation details include the results of performance testing on IBM token ring and AT&T STARLAN local area networks.<
>