A Flexible System Design to Support Object-Groups and Object-Oriented Distributed Programming

. Under many circumstances, the development of distributed applications greatly benefits from mechanisms like process groups, reliable ordered multicast, and message passing. However, toolkits offering these capabilities are often low-level and therefore difficult to program. To ease the development of distributed applications, in this paper we propose to hide these low-level functions behind object-oriented abstractions such as object-groups, Remote Method Calling, and Smart Proxies. Furthermore, we describe how the Electra toolkit provides such object-oriented abstractions in a portable and highly machine-independent way. 1 Introduction Distributed systems like failure tolerant client-server applications, distributed filesystems, nameservers, groupware systems, and distributed scientific computations usually require a fine degree of synchronization between distributed, concurrent activities. These applications often benefit from the presence of process-groups [5] as a structuring me..