The Programmers' Playground: I/O abstraction for user-configurable distributed applications

Abstract

I/O abstraction is offered as a new high-level approach to interprocess communication. Functional components of a distributed system are written as encapsulated modules that act upon local data structures, some of which may be published for external use. Relationships among modules are specified by logical connections among their published data structures. Whenever a module updates published data, I/O takes place implicitly according to the configuration of logical connections. The Programmers' Playground, a software library and runtime system supporting I/O abstraction, is described. Design goals include the separation of communication from computation, dynamic reconfiguration of the communication structure, and the uniform treatment of discrete and continuous data types. Support for end-user configuration of distributed multimedia applications is the motivation for the work.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>