9.7 Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming

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At a conference on parallel programming in the mid-1980s, a prominent researcher in the field stated that human beings will never be able to write parallel programs due to their complexity. The human brain, the researcher continued , can barely comprehend the complexity of sequential programming of large systems. Parallelism is out of the question. Of course, this made all of the parallel hardware people upset, since they were at the conference selling the opposite argument of the researcher. Developers then started thinking about parallelism in the real world. When I teach a course, I have no trouble understanding that there are 20 heartbeats running in parallel, a caterer taking away breakfast , a viewgraph projector turned on, several PCs in the room actively running game programs while those interacting with the game are listening to me (in parallel), the occasional car driving on the street below, and, if in New York, a window washer sitting on a small piece of wood some 400 feet above the street. All of these objects are executing methods in parallel, yet I have no problem understanding the complexity. Why not?

A number of researchers have discussed this question in workshops and published it in texts and research articles. Is the fact that the concurrency is locked inside of objects the key to understanding? Is it better to have the concurrency mechanisms outside, but surrounding the objects? Can we apply the notion of concurrent object-oriented programming to our common parallel programming problems and get better solutions? These are the types of questions being addressed today. There are two excellent texts on concurrent object-oriented programming [18,19].

I will not discuss concurrent object-oriented programming in any great detail in this text. I will say that concurrent object-oriented programming is hard ”but only because concurrent programming is hard, not because the object-oriented paradigm adds any complexity to the problem. There is some vocabulary worth knowing. When studying concurrent object-oriented programming, you will invariably hear people discuss the notion of passive objects versus active objects. Passive objects belong to classes that fall into one of two categories (see Figure 9.13). The first category consists of classes that have not considered concurrency at all, in which case the semantics of the class are not guaranteed under multiple threads of control. The second category consists of classes that have considered multiple threads of control and have solved the problem through blocking. That is, when two or more threads of control want access to an object, the first thread gets control and the others wait on a queue. Some standard concurrency mechanism is used to control the queue, for example, semaphore, monitor, or guard. Active objects belong to classes that guarantee their semantics in the presence of multiple threads of control without the need for blocking (see Figure 9.14). Be careful when reading research articles on concurrent object-oriented programming. Many alternative definitions and uses for the terms "passive" and "active" exist.

Figure 9.13. Examples of passive objects.

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Figure 9.14. Example of an active object.

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Object-Oriented Design Heuristics
Object-Oriented Design Heuristics (paperback)
ISBN: 0321774965
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1996
Pages: 180

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