Distributed shared objects as a communication paradigm
Philip Homburg, Maarten R. van Steen, Andrew S. Tanenbaum · Digital Academic REpository of VU University Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) · 1996
. Current paradigms for interprocess communication are not sufficient to describe the exchange of information at an adequate level of abstraction. They are either too low-level, or their implementations cannot meet performance requirements. As an alternative, we propose distributed shared objects as a unifying concept. These objects offer user-defined operations on shared state, but allow for efficient implementations through replication and distribution of state. In contrast to other object-based models, these implementation aspects are completely hidden from applications. 1 Introduction Communication can be viewed at different levels of abstraction. At a high level, it appears as an exchange of information between processes. These processes are either contained in a single parallel or distributed application, or may otherwise belong to different applications that need to communicate. At a low level, communication appears as the mere transfer of bits from one address space to another...