The Application of Concurrent Object-Oriented Techniques to Reactive Systems

A language and system model combining concurrency, abstract communication and an object orientation offers several advantages in the design and implementation of large-scale reactive systems. An object-orientation captures the abstraction and variety of entities inhabiting the environment while the autonomy of actual entities is clearly reflected by expressions of concurrency in the program of the reactive system. Abstract communication is necessary to achieve data sharing among heterogeneous systems. However, attempts to design and implement a paradigm unifying these three features have encountered unexpected difficulties. These difficulties include the interference between concurrency control (synchronization) and inheritance, inadequate application-oriented communication abstractions, the absence of a useful model of exception handling for concurrent object-oriented applications, and the lack of a powerful and useful theory of computation based on asynchrony.