Is Message Sending Good Enough For Distributed Systems? Synchronization & Communication Revisited

This position paper looks at current day distributed object systems. In most of these systems we see a basic building primitive which offers us the needed distribution capabilities. Most of the time this is a synchronous or asynchronous message send. We argue that this is not good enough for distributed systems. Choosing the 'message-send ' as primitive operation creates too many problems and creates the illusion that writing distributed programs is as easy as 'calling an object'. This is not true. In this paper we would like to present our ideas about this and hope to provoke some discussion about them. Section 1: Distributed Systems any large applications today are built using Object Orientation. This is because OO allows the programmer to think in a more abstract way about his code. OO enables him to encapsulate data, with private, protected and public fields, and use the implicit notion of this (or self). The programmer is now able to request a service from another object by sending a message to it. He has even the power to create something with holes, which will be filled in later (late binding, polymorphism, the abstract keyword). These techniques are very useful, and have changed over time to adapt to the needs of programmers. For example, interfaces, as defined in java, are needed to treat different object hierarchies as if they were the same. And over time some concurrency primitives appeared (like synchronized)