Development of an Object Consistency Maintenance Framework for Group Systems in Distributed Computing Environments

분산 환경에서 그룹시스템에서의 객체 일관성 유지를 위한 체계의 개발

Group collaborative systems are recently emerging to support a group of users engaged in common tasks such as group decision making, engineering design, or collaborative writing. Simultaneously, as communications networks and distributed database systems become core underlying architecture of the organization, the need of collaborative systems are gaining more attentions from industry. In such collaborative systems, as the shared objects may evolve constantly or change for operational purposes, providing the users with synchronized and consistent views of the shared object and maintaining the consistency between shared object and replicated objects are important to improve the overall productivity. This paper provides an change management framework for the group collaborative systems to facilitate managing dependency relationships between shared objects and dependents, and coordinating change and propagation activities in distributed computing environments. Specifically, the framework adopts an object-oriented database paradigm and presents several object constructs capturing dependency management and change notification mechanisms. And the proposed framework accommodates both persistent dependents such as replicated data and transient dependents such as various user views in a single formalism. A prototype system is developed on a commercial object-oriented database management system called OBJECTSTORE using the C++ programming language.