Design and Implementation of a Distributed Software Platform Based on Asynchronous Messages
Nikolas Martens · 2011
Although personal computing has advanced and spread considerably during the last decades, the real computer revolution has not happened yet. In order to promote computer literacy, a system is needed that enables the user to use the power of abstraction for building and arguing about dynamic models. This thesis presents a programming model that follows the paradigm ”everything is an object” [1] to the utmost in order to build a software platform upon it that provides this possibility. The result is a lean yet powerful model based on a single kind computational units which form a virtual network. All entities of the model are therefore concurrent, distributed and persistent. Like objects, they encapsulate behaviour and state and communicate through message passing, but unlike conventional objects, an entity has no methods, messages are asynchronous, the only structure is composition and the only association is specialization.