Class management in a distributed actor system

Abstract

The goal of this project is to develop part of an environment to allow the creation of distributed applications in ACT++. ACT++ is a distributed, object-based programming system in which concurrent object-oriented programs can be written in C++. Programs in ACT++ consist of a collection of active objects called actors. This project is concerned only with the problems related to the creation, destruction, and the invocations of the methods of an object located through a directory agent on a remote machine. The specific services developed in the project allow the dynamic loading and unloading of object code for a class when it is not available in memory, static loading of object code on machines that do not support dynamic linking, and the location of classes and their instances through a directory agent. Other related projects concern the development of a communication infrastructure that configures a collection of heterogeneous machines for use in the distributed version of ACT++ and the use of lightweight threads. The solution functionally was tested on several simple examples.