A Dossier Driven Persistent Objects Facility
Robert Mecklenburg, Charles Clark, Gary Lindstrom and Benny Yih
University of Utah
Center for Software Science
Department of Computer Science
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
E-mail: {mecklen,clark,gary,yih}@cs.utah.edu
Abstract
We describe the design and implementation of a persistent object
storage facility based on a dossier driven approach. Objects are
characterized by dossiers which describe both their language defined
and "extra-linguistic" properties. These dossiers are generated by a
C++ preprocessor in concert with an augmented, but completely C++
compatible, class description language. The design places very few
burdens on the application programmer and can be used without altering
the data member layout of application objects or inheriting from
special classes. The storage format is kept simple to allow the use
of a variety of data storage backends. In addition, these dossiers
can be used to implement (or augment) a run-time typing facility
compatible with the proposed ANSI C++ standard. Finally, by providing
a generic object to byte stream conversion the persistent object
facility can also be used in conjunction with an interprocess
communication facility to provide object-level communication between
processes.
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