1989 Reports

An Object Model for Shared Data

Kaiser, Gail E.; Hailpern, Brent

The classical object model supports private data within objects and clean interfaces among objects, and by definition does not permit sharing of data among arbitrary objects. This is a problem for certain real-world applications, where the same data logically belongs 10 multiple objects and may be distributed over multiple nodes on the network. Rather than give up the advantages of encapsulated objects in modeling real-world entities, we propose a new object model that supports shared data in a distributed environment. The key is separating distribution of computation units from information hiding concerns. We introduce our new object model, describe a motivating example from the financial services domain, and then present a new language, PROFIT, based on the model.