You are cordially invited to a meeting of the Modula-3 User Group at OOPSLA'94, in Portland, Oregon. This meeting is open to all interested parties, especially Modula-3 users and others interested in learning more about Modula-3.
The user group meeting will include presentations on what people are doing with Modula-3 in various organizations, including:
The Vantage Project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories is investigating structuring and reliability mechanisms for very large distributed object systems. Modula-3 is the principal implementation language for the project. The project has built several protocols on top of Modula-3 Network Objects, and is building some tools for programming with Network Objects, among which are IDLNO, an OMG translator for Modula-3 Network Objects, and CM3, a tool for easy integration of C clients of Modula-3 libraries. (See Geoff's slides.)
Obliq is a lexically-scoped untyped interpreted language that supports distributed object-oriented computation. An Obliq computation may involve multiple threads of control within an address space, multiple address spaces on a machine, heterogeneous machines over a local network, and multiple networks over the Internet. Obliq objects have state and are local to a site. Obliq computations can roam over the network, while maintaining network connections. (See the Obliq Quick Start, or Luca's slides[suitable for Mac-compatible laser printers])
Object Systems Laboratory of UMass at Amherst have been working on various aspects of Modula-3 implementations, including support for advanced garbage collection and persistence mechanisms for several years.
VideoVBT is the integration of digital video into Trestle, an object-oriented user interface toolkit written in Modula-3. The display of video frames is managed within the application process using, where possible, shared memory to transmit images to the window system. VideoVBT takes advantage of Modula-3's type system, lightweight threads and garbage collection to develop a flexible architecture that supports the reuse of image data within an application; the object-oriented features of Modula-3 we found most useful were inheritance, partial revelations, and encapsulation. VideoVBT is also integrated into several higher-level tools, such as FormsVBT (a user interface management system) and Obliq (a distributed scripting language; see above) which allow us to dynamically experiment with video applications. (See the ECOOP'94 paper.)
ILU (pronounced eye'-loo) is a system that promotes software interoperability via interfaces. Interfaces between what? Whatever units of program structure are desired. They could be parts of one process, all written in the same language; they could be parts written in different languages, sharing runtime support in one memory image; they could be parts running in different memory images on different machines. ILU supports a variety of languages, including Modula-3. (See Mike's slides, or the ILU Home Page.)
The Distributed Object Management project at GTE Laboratories has been using Modula-3 as their main programming language for their DOM-3 prototype for more than two years, which allowed for features similar to ILU and Obliq (See above). We have found the Modula-3 language and the libraries to be a great boost in our development. More recently we developed idlm3, an OMG IDL translator for Modula-3. (See ECOOP'94 paper for a description of DOM-3.)
We also hope to cover a variety of topics such as:
Please join us! Send your suggestion or interests to the user group organizers.
For more information, see Modula-3 Home Page .
Send comments to farshad@cmass.com
Last modified on Tue Jun 11 09:18:18 PDT 1996 by heydonCopyright (C) 1992, 1996, Digital Equipment Corporation. All rights reserved.