The Synergy Between Object-Oriented Programming and Open System Interconnection

The software engineering practice of building distributed object-oriented applications can be improved dramatically by exploiting the powerful synergism between object-oriented programming (OOP) and Open System Interconnection (OSI). The synergy arises because there are corresponding and complementary elements in both OOP and OSI; these elements are detailed and the synergism resulting from their integration is explained. The architecture of a prototype implementation, the goal of Project Synergy, is described. The environment created by Project Synergy supports application development using classes which are defined in an implementation-independent manner, implemented in possibly different programming languages, and executed in a distributed system on possibly heterogeneous processor architectures.