Reliable Distributed Programming in C++: The Arjuna Approach

Programming in a distributed system is fraught with potential difficulties caused, in part, by the physical distribution of the system itself. By making the distribution of the system transparent it is hoped that the task becomes comparable with that of programming a more traditional centralised system. Objectoriented programming systems are natural starting points for such an attempt due to the inherent modularisation and encapsulation properties they possess. Arjuna is one such system, programmed in C++, which permits the construction of reliable distributed applications in a relatively transparent manner. Objects in Arjuna can be located anywhere in the distributed system and are accessed as if they were purely local to the application. The use of remote procedure calls to perform the actual accesses is hidden by the use of stub generation techniques which operate on the original C++ class descriptions thus furthering the illusion of transparency. Reliability is achieved through the provision of traditional atomic transaction mechanisms implemented using only standard language features.