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.