Linguistic Support for Distributed Programming Abstractions

Christian Heide Damm, Patrick Th. Eugster, Rachid Guerraoui

Abstract: We contribute to addressing context of Java and the type-based publish/subscribe (TPS) abstraction, an object-oriented variant of the publish/subscribe paradigm. We present an experience that compares implementations of TPS in (1) a variant of Java we designed to inherently support TPS, (2) standard Java, and (3) Java augmented with genericity. We derive from our implementation experience general observations on what features a programming language should support in order to enable a satisfactory library implementation of TPS, and finally, also alternative abstractions. In particular, we (re-) insist here on the importance of providing genericity and reflective features in the language, and point out the very fact that current efforts towards providing such features are still insufficient.