Nanites

The focal point of many interactive systems is an information artifact being created and manipulated by one or more users through a user interface. The software components of such an interactive system perform their tasks relative to the data structures that represent the information artifact. System components interact with each other by changing these data and responding when relevant changes are made to them by other components. Perhaps the most difficult problem to be solved when building such data-centric systems is the monitoring problem. System components require the ability to watch for and respond to changes made to complex data structures. Previous monitoring approaches are geared toward monitoring single data items rather than entire data structures. This article describes an new monitoring approach called Nanites that is designed to simplify the task of monitoring complex data structures.