Supporting Distributed Active Objects: A Virtual Machine for Creol on the Java Platform

Abstract

Distributed systems are becoming increasingly important. In order to facilitate the development of distributed systems, new high-level abstractions and programming languages may be convenient. Creol is an experimental high-level object-oriented language for distributed objects. This thesis investigates how to create a low-level run-time environment for Creol by proposing a computational model for the language. A prototype of the model is implemented on the Java platform; this prototype serves as a virtual machine on which Creol programs can be executed and tested. The thesis looks into subject areas such as distribution, concurrency, multiple inheritance, and interleaved execution of statement lists.