Distributed processing: requirements for an object-oriented approach

Substantial benefits, such as increased code reusability, simplified maintainability, and improved reliability can be attained through the proper use of object oriented languages. Often, languages which claim to offer concurrency and object oriented features have exhibited significant inadequacies which impose limitations on the benefits. In addition, it is evident that there is no existing standard used by the designers of these languages. The lack of this consistency presents difficulty for programmers who would like to take advantage of an object oriented approach to distributed processing. Therefore, we combine the requirements for object oriented programming with those for distributed processing. Several solutions which have been proposed in the literature for advertised problems in the combination of distributed processing and object oriented programming languages are discussed and evaluated with respect to the paradigm which we present. These solutions are used to extend an existing language (ABCL/R3) to demonstrate that these features are compatible.