Preface

In the last years the object-oriented paradigm has gained a great popularity among
software engineering researchers and it is now well accepted that the notion of object
provides good foundations for new challenges of parallel, distributed and open
computing. The notions of objects, classes and message passing help in structuring and
encapsulation of software modules and enhance the reusability of software components. At
the same time these notions are flexible enough to match various granularities of
software and hardware architectures. Two workshops, named France Japan Workshop on
Object Parallel and Distributed Computation  were held  in Tokyo 21-23 June 1995
(OBPDC'95) and in Toulouse 15-17 October 1997(OBPDC'97). It provided a forum for
researchers from conceptual, theoretical, implementational, and applicational
backgrounds, to discuss, and compare their respective proposals and experiences, for
developing next-generation object-based
parallel and distributed computing systems. Full papers of OBPDC'95 were published in
LNCS SV 1107.

Contribution of the book

This volume represents the formal proceedings of  full papers of OBPDCâ97. After the
workshop, the participants were requested to submit full papers and a standard review
process was taken for the submissions. The 16 selected papers compose a representative
and balanced set of timely research contributions to the growing field of object-based
parallel and distributed computation. They reflect various aspects, from programming
language and operating system design, to application oriented development and formal
foundations for specifying and verifying properties of systems. They are organized into
5 groups, according to their subjects:

.  Formalisms
.  Parallel Computing
.  Concurrent and Distributed Programming
.  Software Architectures and Middleware
.  Resource Management

Acknowledgements

This workshop was primarily sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
(JSPS), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and notably its
Engineering Sciences Department (SPI) and International Relations Division (DRI), the
GDR de la programmation, the Conseil R\'egional de Midi Pyr\'en\'ees, the Conseil G\'en\'eral
de la Haute Garonne, the Universit\'e Paul Sabatier and the Institut de Recherche en
Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT). We would like to express our thanks to these
institutions for their help.We would like to express also our appreciation to Marcos
Castilho and Rami El-Baida for their help in the final typesetting of the papers. Last
but not the least, we would like to thank the authors of the included papers for their
invaluable contributions to the book and for their cooperation during the editing
process.