40 Years of Computing at Newcastle
Department Technical Report Series No. 560
Atomic Actions Based on Distributed/Concurrent Exception Resolution
A. Romanovsky
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1996
Abstract
The state of art in concurrent exception handling and resolution is
discussed and a brief outline of all research in this area given. Our
intention is to demonstrate that exception resolution is a very useful
concept which should be used to facilitate joint forward error recovery in
concurrent and distributed systems. To do this, several new arguments are
considered. We regard resolution as reaching an agreement among cooperating
participants of an atomic action. It is provided by the underlying system,
which makes it unified and less error prone, and this is important for
forward error recovery, complex by nature. We classify atomic action
schemes into asynchronous and synchronous ones, and resolution
implementations into centralised and decentralised ones. Another issue that
we believe to be very important is about introducing atomic action schemes
based on exception resolution into existing concurrent and distributed
languages, which usually have only local (one-process) exceptions. We
outline the basic approach and demonstrate its applicability by showing how
resolution can be used in Ada83, Ada95 (for both concurrent and distributed
systems) and Java. A discussion of ways to make this concept more object
oriented and, with the help of reflection, more flexible and useful,
concludes the paper.
Keywords: atomic actions, forward error recovery, exception handling,
concurrent and distributed exception resolution, Ada83, Ada95, Java
Department Technical Report Series - 1996
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Contents Page - 40 Years of Computing at Newcastle
Technical Report Abstract No. 560, 30 June 1997