DOORS: Distributed Object Oriented Runtime System (Position Paper)

Abstract

The large software applications of today provide abstractions of the real-life systems that they support. A digital model of the system, and of the changes that occur within, are being maintained and updated, as triggered by real-life events. Morphologically, such applications contain several distinct architectural entities: databases holding the state, central components describing how the system reacts to external events and mechanisms through which the user can view the current state and issue new commands. Each of these entities may use distinct paradigms and employ different technologies. A production-ready software application ends up assembling a relatively high technology stack and provides the final abstractions for both the problem and its solution. In this paper we propose a short-circuit for the long chain of technologies that are usually employed in large, production-ready software applications. The resulting architecture is a distributed, message-based system which behaves as a hybrid between a database and a runtime environment. The system operates with persistent and live entities, encapsulating both state and operations and therefore easily assimilated with OOP classes.