A World-Wide Distributed System Using Java and the Internet

  • K. Mani Chandy ,
  • Adam Rifkin ,
  • Paolo A. G. Sivilotti ,
  • J. Mandelson ,
  • Matthew Richardson ,
  • W. Tanaka ,
  • L. Weisman

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 1996) |

This paper describes the design of a distributed system built using Java that supports peer-to-peer communication among processes spread across a network. We identify the requirements of a software layer that supports distributed computing, and we propose a design that meets those requirements. Our primary concerns are (1) the identification, specification, and implementation of software components that can be composed in different ways to develop correct distributed applications; (2) reasoning about the components systematically; and (3) p providing services to the components. This paper deals with the last of these concerns. Though our implementation uses Java, the fundamental ideas apply to any object-oriented language that supports messaging and threads. Alternative implementations use such languages coupled with object request brokers or remote procedure invocation mechanisms.