Abstract

A persistent object system (PO-system) is a system used for storing and retrieving persistent objects. Such systems already exist, but they are programming language and database dependent and, in many cases, difficult to use. We have designed and implemented a persistent object system which should be simple, inexpensive and easy to use. A client/server networking model was chosen to implement the system to make it independent of the applications' platforms and programming languages. The implementation of the system is written in the programming language C on the UNIX platform. PO-system provides a server called PO-server. An application program uses the Application Programming Interface (API) to communicate requests to the PO-server. In this way, the application program can obtain persistent object services without requiring any knowledge of the underlying mechanism of the PO-system.