Generic Distribution Support for Programming Systems

This dissertation provides constructive proof, through the implementation of a middleware, that distribution transparency is practical, generic, and extensible. Fault tolerant distributed services can be developed by using the failure detection abilities of the middleware. By generic we mean that the middleware can be used for many different programming languages and paradigms. Distribution for each kind of language entity is done in terms of consistency protocols, which guarantee that the semantics of the entities are preserved in a distributed setting. The middleware allows new consistency protocols to be added easily. The efficiency of the middleware and the ease of integration are shown by coupling the middleware to a programming system, which encompasses the object oriented, the functional, and the concurrent-declarative programming paradigms. Our measurements show that the distribution middleware is competitive with the most popular distributed programming systems (JavaRMI, .NET, IBM CORBA)

On the Interaction between Mobile Processes and Objects

Java's remote method invocation mechanism provides a number of features that extend the functionality of traditional client/server-based distributed systems. However, there are a number of characteristics of the language that influence its utility as a vehicle in which to express lightweight mobile processes. Among these are its highly imperative sequential core, the close coupling of control and state as a consequence of its object model, and the fact remote method calls are not properly tail-recursive. These features impact the likelihood that Java can easily support process and object mobility for programs which exhibit complex communication and distribution patterns. 1 Introduction Distributed systems have historically been concerned with issues concerning the partitioning and transmission of data among a collection of machines [15]. Typically, these systems allow code to be distributed and accessed in one of two ways. In some systems, each node holds code controlling the resourc..