DC++: distributed object-oriented system support on top of OSF DCE

Abstract

The OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) is becoming an industry standard for open distributed computing. DCE only supports client/server-style applications based on the remote procedure call (RPC) communication model. The authors describe the design and implementation of an extended distributed object-oriented environment, DC++, on top of DCE. As opposed to RPC, it supports a uniform object model, location independent invocation of fine-grained objects, remote reference parameter passing, dynamic migration of objects between nodes, and C++ language integration. Moreover, the implementation is fully integrated with DCE, using DCE UUIDs for object identification, DCE threads for interobject concurrency, DCE RPC for remote object invocation, and the DCE Cell Directory Service (CDS) for optional retrieval of objects by name. An additional stub compiler enables automatic generation of C++-based object communication interfaces. Low-level parameter encoding is done by DCE RPC's stub generation facility using the C-based DCE interface definition language (IDL).