Debugging of Distributed Object-Oriented Applications

Our first job was to adapt the causal partial order of events to the new context of object oriented distributed applications. We want to order method invocations, method executions and blocks of code. By this way we adopt an approach based on a logic of action where only two events are needed : the begin and the end of the action. Then the causal ordering of distributed objects applications is obtained from a local source of order and a communication source of order. The local source of order is in fact the result of four different kind of ordering that can be observed (sequential program ordering, threads fork and join, synchronization or behaviour instruction ordering and transaction ordering). The communication source of ordering is deduced from the remote procedure calls. Finally, as in the message passing approach, we can define the concept of coherent global state that defines a correct global state observation.