Linguistic Support for Large-Scale Distributed Programming

We present three operators for the expression of event-based large-scale distributed programming. In short, these operators support a publish/subscribe-based interaction scheme, leading to a distributed object programming model merging the benefits of objects and events. For the integration of our operators into a strongly typed object-oriented language we identify a set of four concepts, roughly (1) serialization, (2) multiple subtyping, (3) multi-methods, and (4) closures, which provided by a language, enable its smooth integration with our model of publish/subscribe interaction. These concepts are illustrated through Java, which we augment by anonymous methods, a simple form of closures, and in which we use double dispatch to make up for the lack of multi-methods. A precompiler transforms code related to our publish/subscribe operators into calls to specifically generated typed adapters, which are similar to typed stubs/skeletons for remote method invocations.