Premium
Experience with distributed Smalltalk
Author(s) -
Bennett John K.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380200204
Subject(s) - smalltalk , computer science , distributed object , task (project management) , object (grammar) , common object request broker architecture , distributed computing , object oriented programming , programming language , engineering , systems engineering , artificial intelligence
Distributed Smalltalk (DS) is an implementation of Smalltalk that supports the interaction of many Smalltalk users on many machines. It provides communication and interaction among remote Smalltalk users, direct access to remote objects, and a degree of object sharing among users. The distributed aspects of the system are largely user transparent. Many of the major design issues and implementation decisions associated with Distributed Smalltalk have previously been reported. This paper concentrates on the impact of those decisions and describes how DS is used to build distributed applications. Three example applications are described: remote file access, animated distributed objects, and offloading a compute‐intensive task to a non‐Smalltalk host. Based on our experience with DS, we present an evaluation of its design and implementation.