Partially Distributed Objects

Markus Hof
Johannes Kepler University Linz
Institute for Practical Computer Science
Altenbergerstr. 69, A-4040 Linz
hof@ssw.uni-linz.ac.at

Abstract

We introduce light weight distributed objects. The main goal is to ease the transition of existing object-oriented applications, not aware of distributed available objects, to applications which do support them. This implies for transparent method invocations on distributed objects, i.e. methods may have arbitrary parameters. Pointers are handled either through a deep copy, or a shallow copy which keeps the identity of the copied object. Stub and proxy code is only generated on demand (just-in-time code generation). Especially, our distributed objects support distributed models, to allow applications written using the MVC concept, to offer their models over the network. We introduce a notification mechanism from server object to surrogate object, partially distributed method invocation, and just-in-time generation of stub code. Our objects build upon a generic network interface which allows access over arbitrary networks (LANs, Internet, ...).

Published in Workshop Proceedings of ECOOP'96, Linz, July 1996, ISBN 3-920993-67-5
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