Language-Level Support for Exploratory Programming of Distributed Virtual Environments
In Proc ACM UIST ‘96 (Symp. on User Interface Software and Technology), Seattle, WA, November 6–8, 1996, pp. 83–94. Language-Level Support for Exploratory Programming of Distributed Virtual Environments Blair MacIntyre and Steven Feiner Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027 {bm,feiner}@cs.columbia.edu http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~{bm,feiner} Abstract resulted in an unmanageable welter of client-server relation- ships, with each of a dozen or more processes needing to We describe COTERIE, a toolkit that provides language- create and maintain explicit connections to each other and to level support for building distributed virtual environments. handle inevitable crashes. COTERIE is based on the distributed data-object paradigm for distributed shared memory. Any data object in COTE- We spent a sufficiently large portion of our time reengineer- RIE can be declared to be a Shared Object that is replicated ing client-server code that it became clear to us that our fully in any process that is interested in it. These Shared implementation of the client-server model was unsuitable Objects support asynchronous data propagation with atomic for exploratory programming of distributed research proto- serializable updates, and asynchronous notification of types. The heart of the problem, as we saw it, was a lack of updates. COTERIE is built in Modula-3 and uses existing support for data sharing that was both efficient and easy for Modula-3 packages that support an integrated interpreted programmers to use in the face of frequent and unantici- language, multithreading, and 3D animation. Unlike other pated changes.
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