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Java Class Broker—A Seamless Bridge from Local to Distributed Programming

2000; Elsevier BV; Volume: 60; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1006/jpdc.2000.1651

1096-0848

Zvi Har'el, Zvi Rosberg,

Distributed systems and fault tolerance

Distributed object programming is significantly more complex than programming a local host and requires highly skilled developers. Current distributed middleware for distributed programming is hard to use mainly because its programming model and runtime support are quite different from those of local programming. For instance, the local reference and the remote reference to the same object are of different types and therefore are not assignable to the same set of references. Hence, a remote reference cannot always replace a local reference as a parameter in a method invocation. Furthermore, a local object cannot be referenced remotely, unless it has been first converted into a remote object. Another distributed programming obstacle with current middleware is that access to classes and resources residing across the distributed environment is not as natural and transparent as with local programming, where all resources are in the same classpath. The Java language introduces a new scope where distributed object programming can become as easy and simple as local programming. In this paper we identify the main distinctions between local and distributed Java programs and present new middleware which achieves this goal. The proposed middleware converts any Java-enabled host into a Java peer, which can share its classes and object instances and interact with other Java peers in a manner which almost reflects a single system image to the user.