A Dossier Driven Persistent Objects Facility
				   

			  Robert Mecklenburg
			    Charles Clark
			    Gary Lindstrom
			      Benny Yih
				   
			     UUCS-94-002
				   
		    Department of Computer Science
			  University of Utah
		    Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 USA
				   
			   January 10, 1994
				   
				   
			       Abstract

We describe the design and implementation of a persistent object
storage facility based on a dossier driven approach.  Objects are
characterized by dossiers which describe both their language defined
and ``extra-linguistic'' properties.  These dossiers are generated by
a C++ preprocessor in concert with an augmented, but completely C++
compatible, class description language.  The design places very few
burdens on the application programmer and can be used without altering
the data member layout of application objects or inheriting from
special classes.  The storage format is kept simple to allow the use
of a variety of data storage backends.  Finally, by providing a
generic object to byte stream conversion the persistent object
facility can also be used in conjunction with an interprocess
communication facility to provide object-level communication between
processes.