4th ECOOP Workshop on Object-Orientation and Operating Systems

ECOOP-OOOSWS'2001

Budapest, Tuesday, June 19, 2001

INVITED TALK (UPDATED!)

Persistence, Operating Systems and current trends in Computer Science

Invited Talk by Alan Dearle

School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, Scotland
al@dcs.st-and.ac.uk

The principles of orthogonal persistence were first proposed in 1978 by Atkinson and were refined in 1982 by Atkinson and Morrison in their seminal paper. During the 80s several languages were developed that supported orthogonal persistence notably PS-algol and Napier88. Also about this time Keedy and Rosenberg developed the Monads operating system which supported some aspects of orthogonal persistence. The 1990s have seen a number of operating system initiatives to support orthogonal persistence including Grasshopper, Keykos, L4 and Charm. In this talk I will examine the requirements of orthogonal persistence, look at the attempts to support it at both the language and operating system levels and examine how relevant these approaches are set against the current trends of Java, XML, the World Wide Web, ubiquitous computing and the like.