APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR ACESSING AN OBJECT ORIENTED OBJECT USING A SMART PASSIVE REFEERNCE

A smart passive reference to an object oriented object provides control over creation and deletion of the object it references. A reference count is incremented when an active reference to an object is created, and is decremented when an active reference to the object is deleted. The smart passive reference allows suspending the activity of a thread until no threads have active references to the object. In addition, the smart passive reference can be used to invalidate the smart passive references in other threads, thereby allowing a thread to obtain exclusive access to an object. The smart passive reference also provides an interface to cause the managed object to be deleted when the reference count goes to zero.