Transparency and Asynchronous Method Invocation

This article focuses on transparency in the context of asynchronous method invocation. It describes two solutions available to provide full-transparency: where asynchronism is entirely masked to the developer. The main contribution of this paper is to clearly present the drawbacks of this approach: exception handling and developer consciousness are two problems inherent to full-transparency that makes it at least, hard to use, at worst, useless. This paper defends explicit asynchronous method invocation and proposes semi-transparency: almost all the complexity of asynchronism is masked to the developer but the asynchronism itself. keywords: transparency, asynchronous method invocation, concurrency