Modern distributed object systems pass remote parameters based on their runtime type. This design choice limits the expressiveness, readability, and maintainability of distributed applications. While a rich body of research is concerned with middleware extensibility, modern distributed object systems do not offer programming facilities to extend their remote parameter passing semantics. Thus, extending these semantics requires understanding and modifying the underlying middleware implementation. This thesis addresses these design shortcomings by presenting (i) a declarative and extensible approach to remote parameter passing that decouples parameter passing from parameter types, and (ii) a plugin-based framework, DeXteR, that enables the programmer to extend the native set of remote parameter passing semantics, without having to understand or modify the underlying middleware implementation. DeXteR treats remote parameter passing as a distributed cross-cutting concern. It uses generative and aspect-oriented techniques, enabling the implementation of different parameter passing semantics as reusable application-level plugins that work with application, system, and third-party library classes. The flexibility and expressiveness of the framework is validated by implementing several non-trivial parameter passing semantics as DeXteR plugins. The material presented in this thesis has been accepted for publication at the ACM/USENIX Middleware 2008 conference. / Master of Science

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:48:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 SergioQM.pdf: 363127 bytes, checksum: 7b8fb995a67b3e514e8b774e59124df3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-03-03 / New programming language paradigms have commonly been tested and eventually incorporated into hardware description languages. Recently, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has shown successful in improving the modularity of object-oriented and structured languages such Java, C++ and C. Thus, one can expect that, using AOP, one can improve the understanding of the hardware systems under design, as well as make its components more reusable and easier to maintain. We apply AOP in applications developed using the SystemC library. Several examples will be presented illustrating how to combine AOP and SystemC. During the presentation of these examples, the benefits of this new approach will also be discussed / Novos paradigmas de linguagens de programa??o v?em sendo comumente testados e geralmente s?o incorporados depois por linguagens de descri??o de hardware. Recentemente, a programa??o orientada a aspectos (POA) provou ser ?til na tentativa de melhorar a modularidade de linguagens estruturadas e orientadas a objeto tais como Java, C++ e C. Diante de tal fato, podemos esperar que o uso de POA pode melhorar o entendimento de sistemas hardware que est?o sendo projetados, bem como tornar seus componentes mais reus?veis e f?ceis de manter. Iremos abordar ent?o o uso de POA em aplica??es desenvolvidas utilizando a biblioteca SystemC. Ser?o apresentados v?rios exemplos que ilustram o uso de POA juntamente com SystemC, mostrando alternativas e discutindo os seus benef?cios