H-PCTE is a distributed object management system (OMS) which is intended to be used as a basis of distributed software development environments (SDE), or, more generally, distributed document editing systems. Systems of that sort are often termed SDE frameworks, or repositories. H-PCTE provides the following set of integrated basic services:
data management services based on the entity relationship model with extensions such as composite objects, versions, multiple inheritance, long fields (files), dynamically created views
schema management services: applications can dynamically create new types or modify existing types, the instances of which are automatically converted.
access controls: one object base can be used be several users. Access permissions can be granted to individual users and to nested user groups.
concurrency control: one object base can be accessed concurrently by several applications, notably tools of an SDE. Features of the CC mechanism are:
H-PCTE provides several types of activities, from classical transactions, which offer a high degree of protection from concurrent access, to unprotected activities.
Nested tool transactions are supported.
H-PCTE supports extremely fine-grained locks, namely locks for individual attributes of objects or links.
Notification: applications can request the OMS kernel to be informed about various modifications of data granules. This mechanism makes it easy to propagate change between tools / windows which use or show the same data.
H-PCTE offers both efficient navigational access to objects, as defined in the PCTE standards ECMA-149/-158 and non-navigational, set-oriented access through two query languages, NTT and P-OQL.