A Case for Synchronous Objects in Component-Bound Architectures

This paper assesses the concept of synchronous objects, and shows that these objects make it possible to treat most facets of the development of interactive/distributed applications (e.g., multi-threading, GUI integration, remote accesses, inheritance anomaly, modeling and performance) very e#- ciently. A synchronous object is similar to a common object, but it can execute a special method on a thread attached to the object and control the instants at which its methods are executed, i.e., a synchronous object A can postpone a call from another object B until A is ready, and/or attempt several calls in parallel. This approach draws on Actors and on POOL, but it matches better the best known formal analysis methods. It can interconnect the GUI (graphical user interfaces) , the local components and the remote servers of an application in a uniform way, and provides thus a means to define the components of a distributed application in a way that merges smoothly the component signatures (wh..