CSE775 - Distributed Objects

There are three recurring themes in this course: (1) building components, (2) distributing components across platform and technology boundaries, and (3) sharing code across platform boundaries.

• Components
  Blocks of code encapsulated behind interfaces and object factories, designed to provide small cohesive bits of functionality that can be used as building blocks for bigger applications, e.g., composable objects. Clients manage component life-time through reference counting by calling interface functions AddRef() and Release().
• Distributed
  Distributing an application's processing across thread, process, and machine boundaries, and also distributing its processing across technology boundaries. The technology boundaries we are interested in are between native code (C++), semi-managed code (COM and WinRT), and fully managed code (C++/CLI, C#, and Java).
• Cross-Platform
  Building a small set of platform specific components on which all the rest of an application's code runs without change on more than one platform. Examples of the base components are file and directory handling, threads and synchronization, and communication. We will use both Windows and Linux platforms for our assigned projects.

In this course we will use both platform APIs and compiler libraries to support applications by managing files, processes, theads, inter-process communication, and network communication via sockets. Our goal is to understand how to provide platform abstractions that complement compiler libraries, support common application code across multiple platforms, and to learn details about the platforms that come only from using their resources directly.

To do this you will complete one project using the Microsoft COM technology to build a useful component on Windows driven by scripting, a console application, and a WPF application. For this project you will also build a component for Linux driven by scripts and a console application.

You will also complete a rather large technology project on which you may collaborate with one or two other students from this class. For this second project you will research some interesting technology from a list provided, develop some probing code examples to illustrate how the technology works, and then implement an interesting application using what you learned.

You will develop native code using C and C++ languages via Visual Studio and gcc, the GNU compiler suite, as well as managed code written in C# or Java. Most are distributed applications using threads, messaging, sockets, and Graphical User Interfaces.