Object Oriented Condensed Graphs

Abstract

Even though Object Orientation has been proven to be an effective programming paradigm for software development, it has not been shown to be an ideal solution for the development of large scale parallel and distributed systems. There are a number of reasons for this: the parallelism and synchronisation in these systems has to be explicitly managed by the programmer; few Object Oriented languages have implicit support for Garbage Collection in parallel applications; and the state of a systems of concurrent objects is difficult to determine. In contrast, the Condensed Graph model provides a way of explicitly expressing parallelism but with implicit synchronisation; its implementation in the WebCom system provides for automatic garbage collection and the dynamic state of the application is embodied in the topology of the Condensed Graph. These characteristics free programmers from the difficult and error prone process of explicitly managing parallelism and thus allows them to concentrate on expressing a solution to the problem rather than on its low level implementation. Object Oriented Condensed Graphs is a computational paradigm which combines Condensed Graphs with object orientation and this unified model leverages the advantages of both paradigms. This paper illustrates the basic features of Object Oriented Condensed Graphs as well as its support for large scale software development.