Atomic data abstractions in a distributed collaborative editing system

ABSTRACT

This paper describes our experience implementing CES, a distributed Collaborative Editing System written in Argus, a language that includes facilities for managing long-lived distributed data. Argus provides <i>atomic actions,</i> which simplify the handling of concurrency and failures, and mechanisms for implementing <i>atomic data types,</i> which ensure serializability and recoverability of actions that use them. This paper focuses on the support for atomicity in Argus, especially the support for building new atomic types. Overall the mechanisms in Argus made it relatively easy to build CES; however, we encountered interesting problems in several areas. For example, much of the processing of an atomic action in Argus is handled automatically by the run-time system; several examples are presented that illustrate areas where more explicit control in the implementations of atomic types would be useful.

REFERENCES

• 1: Englebart, D. C. Toward High-Performance Knowledge Workers. Office Automation Conference Digest, AFIPS, April, 1982, pp. 279--290.
• 2: K. P. Eswaran , J. N. Gray , R. A. Lorie , I. L. Traiger, The notions of consistency and predicate locks in a database system, Communications of the ACM, v.19 n.11, p.624-633, Nov. 1976 [doi>10.1145/360363.360369]
• 3: Gifford, D. K. and J. E. Donahue. Coordinating Independent Atomic Actions. Proceedings of the IEEE CompCon85, IEEE, February, 1985, pp. 92--94.
• 4: Greif, I. Computer Support for Cooperative Office Activities. Proceedings of the 1982 Office Automation Conference, AFIPS, San Francisco, California, April, 1982.
• 5: Greif, I. Teleconferencing and the Computer-Based Office Workstation. Teleconferencing and Interactive Media '82, Madison, Wisconsin, May, 1982.
• 6: Leslie Lamport, Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.7, p.558-565, July 1978 [doi>10.1145/359545.359563]
• 7: Butler W. Lampson, Atomic Transactions, Distributed Systems - Architecture and Implementation, An Advanced Course, p.246-265, January 1981
• 8: Barbara Liskov , Robert Scheifler, Guardians and Actions: Linguistic Support for Robust, Distributed Programs, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.5 n.3, p.381-404, July 1983 [doi>10.1145/2166.357215]
• 9: Barbara Liskov, The Argus Language and System, Distributed Systems: Methods and Tools for Specification, An Advanced Course, April 3-12, 1984 and April 16-25, 1985 Munich, p.343-430, January 1985
• 10: B Liskov , E Moss , A Snyder , R Atkinson , J C. Schaffert , T Bloom , R Scheifler, CLU reference manual, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 1984
• 11: Brian M. Oki , Barbara H. Liskov , Robert W. Scheifler, Reliable object storage to support atomic actions, Proceedings of the tenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.147-159, December 1985, Orcas Island, Washington, United States
• 12: Sunil K. Sarin , Irene Greif, Software for interactive on-line conferences, Proceedings of the second ACM-SIGOA conference on Office information systems, p.46-58, January 1984
• 13: Sunil Sarin , Irene Greif, Computer-based real-time conferencing systems, Computer, v.18 n.10, p.33-45, Oct. 1985 [doi>10.1109/MC.1985.1662711]
• 14: Seliger, R. The Design and Implementation of a Distributed Program for Collaborative Editing. Master Th., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 1985.
• 15: Suzanne Sluizer , Paul M. Cashman, XCP: an experimental tool for managing cooperative activity, Proceedings of the 1985 ACM thirteenth annual conference on Computer Science, p.251-258, March 1985, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/320599.320686]
• 16: Randall Hagner Trigg, A network-based approach to text handling for the on-line scientific community, 1983
• 17: E. F. Walker, ORPHAN DETECTION IN THE ARGUS SYSTEM, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1984
• 18: W. E. Weihl, SPECIFICATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ATOMIC DATA TYPES, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1984
• 19: Weihl, W. Linguistic Support for Atomic Data Types. Proceedings of the Workshop on Persistence and Data Types, Scotland, August, 1985.
• 20: William Weihl , Barbara Liskov, Implementation of resilient, atomic data types, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.7 n.2, p.244-269, April 1985 [doi>10.1145/3318.3319]