Object-oriented programming is a widely adopted paradigm for desktop software development.
This paradigm partitions software into separate entities, objects, which consist
of data and related procedures used to modify and inspect it. The paradigm has evolved
during the last few decades to emphasize decoupling between object implementations, via
means such as explicit interface inheritance and event-based implicit invocation.
Inter-process communication (IPC) technologies allow applications to interact with each
other. This enables making software distributed across multiple processes, resulting in a
modular architecture with benefits in resource sharing, robustness, code reuse and security.
The support for object-oriented programming concepts varies between IPC systems.
This thesis is focused on the D-Bus system, which has recently gained a lot of users, but
is still scantily researched. D-Bus has support for asynchronous remote procedure calls
with return values and a content-based publish/subscribe event delivery mechanism.
In this thesis, several patterns for method invocation in D-Bus and similar systems are
compared. The patterns that simulate synchronous local calls are shown to be dangerous.
Later, we present a state-caching proxy construct, which avoids the complexity of
properly asynchronous calls for object inspection. The proxy and certain supplementary
constructs are presented conceptually as generic object-oriented design patterns. The
e ect of these patterns on non-functional qualities of software, such as complexity, performance
and power consumption, is reasoned about based on the properties of the D-Bus
system. The use of the patterns reduces complexity, but maintains the other qualities at a
good level.
Finally, we present currently existing means of specifying D-Bus object interfaces for the
purposes of code and documentation generation. The interface description language used
by the Telepathy modular IM/VoIP framework is found to be an useful extension of the
basic D-Bus introspection format.Siirretty Doriast
