Subject: OBST3-3.4 available !
From: [email-masked] (The OBST Team)
Date: 9 Dec 1993 23:24:56 +0200
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce

OBST3-3.4 is now available at ftp.fzi.de under /pub/OBST/OBST3-3.4 

We made mainly the following changes (a more detailed
description can be found in README.changes):

- Configuration/Installation: now based on GNU's autoconf
- Shared Objects: support for them (at least for SunOS 4.1*) is added
- Incremental Loading: moved out of basic OBST library
- Bug Fixes
- Major Performance Improvements
  for Mapping<sos_String,...> and Directory<...>

The installation of OBST requires a C++ compiler
(GNU g++ 2.3.3/2.4.5/2.5.3, or AT&T 2.1/3.01).

The OBST graphical tools run under the X-Windows system (X11R5 and R4). 
Installation has been tested by us for SunOS4.1.3 and LINUX.

Support for HP-UX has been added by Gabor Karsai
<[email-masked]>, support for SUN SC2.0.1 by Mats Johnson
<[email-masked]>, the port to Solaris2 was done by Jaakko Salminen
<[email-masked]>.  Thanks a lot!

Best regards and happy OBST programming. 

   The OBST Team

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

README of OBST3-3.4
-------------------

Version: OBST3-3.4
Date:    6/12/93

The OBject system of STONE --- OBST
-----------------------------------

The persistent object management system OBST was developed by
Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) as a contribution to the STONE
project. This project (supported by grant no. ITS8902A7 from the
BMFT, i.e. the German Ministry for Research) aims at the development
of a software engineering environment for education purposes and is
carried out as a joint project of nine german universities and
research institutions.

An essential feature of STONE is that the object oriented paradigm 
is pursued consequently as a key concept. OBST is the common persistent
object store for all tools within the STONE environment. 

Data Model
---------

The OBST data model can be characterized by the following properties:

 * Schema definition language syntactically similar to C++
 * Support of multiple inheritance
 * Generic classes
 * Abstract classes and methods
 * Distinction between public, protected, and private methods
 * Redefinition of methods
 * Overloading of methods

Schemas and Containers
----------------------

Schemas are compiled by the OBST schema compiler. The compilation
results are instances of classes of the meta schema. From these
instances in a next step interfaces to different programming languages
can be generated. At present the C++ language binding is implemented,
interfaces to Lisp and other languages are planned.

Objects are stored in so-called containers. The container an object
belongs to is determined at the time of object creation and fixed
throughout the object's lifetime. Containers are the units of 
clustering, synchronization, and recovery. Objects can be referenced
by other objects across container boundaries.

Incremental Loading
-------------------

OBST provides a mechanism to incrementally load methods. This enables
programs to deal with objects whose type is defined after the program 
itself has been developed. This is useful in systems that provide for 
inheritance and it supports schema evolution. We used it e.g. for
programs that interpret the object base and call methods of the
found objects (for example the below mentioned browser).

Prototype
---------

Since end 1990 the first prototype of OBST is available and is shipped
to interested universities and research institutions. The current
version is publicly available via FTP (see below) since March '92.
Our current mailing list (see below) comprises about 190 persons.

The system comes with the schema compiler, a library of predefined
classes (like Set<Entity>, List<Entity>, String, ...), a graphical
object browser (more a shell than a browser), the structurer and
flattener (STF), tclOBST, and all manuals. For STF and
tclOBST see below.

Structurer and Flattener
------------------------

This is a tool to build objects from bytestrings and flatten objects
down to bytestrings. It is intended to be used when coupling UNIX
tools to the object management system. The user defines a grammar that
describes her objects. Afterwards, the structurer parses an ascii 
text according to the given grammar and creates an OBST object
structure that represents the corresponding parse tree.
The flattener does the inverse transformation, that means it generates
an ascii text from a given OBST object structure according to the given
grammar.

tclOBST
-------

tclOBST is a library which provides an embedding of OBST into the
interactive tool command language tcl, developed by John Ousterhout
at the University of Berkeley.
Based on the standard tcl shells, which are also comprised in the
tclOBST distribution, tclOBST offers interactive access to the complete
functionality modelled by OBST schemata.

System Requirements
-------------------

For the prototype's installation a C++ compiler (GNU g++ 2.3.3/2.4.5
or AT&T 2.0/2.1/3.01) and the X-Windows system (currently X11R4 or
X11R5) for the graphical tools are required.  Installation is
well-tried on SUN 4/* systems and should be no problem on other UNIX
machines, too. You can find a more detailed description of the
supported platforms in the README.install.OBST*.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

For more information please mail to:

                Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI)
                       STONE Projekt
                 Haid-und-Neu-Strasse 10-14
                     D-76131 Karlsruhe
                          Germany

or email to:  [email-masked]

Phone:        ++49-721-9654-601
Fax:          ++49-721-9654-609
Teletex:      721 190 fziKA

The OBST system is available via anonymous FTP from
ftp.fzi.de [141.21.4.3].

The system as well as some overview papers, documentation
(User's Guide, Language Reference Manual, Tutorial, ...),
and lots of manual pages can be found in the directory /pub/OBST.

Sites interested in getting information about new OBST developments
are welcome to register in our mailing list. This can be done
by sending an email with subject "obst-mailing-list" and contents
"SUBSCRIBE <firstname> <surname> <email-adr>" to [email-masked].
If the subscription was successful you will receive a confirmation.

Bug reports should contain a small example program with which the
bug can be reproduced, or at least a detailed description of the
observed phenomenon. 

Besides bug reports we are strongly interested in all experiences
our users make with OBST (e.g. sufficiency of data model, performance,
...) and in our users' application areas and the applications as
well. So, please don't hesitate to send us a short note.

Best regards and happy OBST programming.

   The OBST Team

---

BTW "Obst" is the German word for "fruit",
    so have a fruitful time with OBST!

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