A Dossier Driven Persistent Objects Facility

We describe the design and implementation of a persistent object storage facility based on a dossier driven approach Objects are characterized by dossiers which describe both their language de ned and extra linguistic properties These dossiers are generated by a C preprocessor in concert with an augmented but completely C compatible class description language The design places very few burdens on the application programmer and can be used without altering the data member layout of application objects or inheriting from special classes The storage format is kept simple to allow the use of a variety of data storage backends Finally by providing a generic object to byte stream conversion the persistent object facility can also be used in conjunction with an interprocess communication facility to provide object level communication between processes This research was sponsored by Hewlett Packard s Research Grants Program and by the Advanced Research Projects Agency DOD monitored by the Department of the Navy O ce of the Chief of Naval Research under Grant number N J The opinions and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing o cial views or policies either expressed or implied of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the U S Government or Hewlett Packard