Treating programs as objects: The computational proxy experience

Migrating data to a new database model presents problems if there are existing application programs that must continue to access the data, bu that cannot be converted immediately. If the target database is object-oriented, such a legacy program can be encapsulated as an object or a message. We argue that some applications will benefit from further “reification” of execution instances as database objects. We introduce a “computational proxy” mechanism and our prototype implementation of it for computational chemistry codes. We conclude with a discussion of where declarative capabilities would have been a useful adjunct to object-oriented database features.