A case for event-driven distributed objects

Abstract. Much work has been done in order to make the development of distributed systems as close as sensible to the development of centralized systems. As a result, there are today good distributed object solutions that closely resemble centralized programming. However, this very attempt to mimic centralized programming implies that distributed objects create the illusion that threads traverse the whole distributed application. This brings all the problems related to multi-thread programming, including the need to reason about the thread behavior of the whole application, which gets amplified by the large scale and inherent non-determinism of distributed systems. Moreover, distributed objects present other troubles when the application is not “pure ” client-server, i.e., when the client has other things to do besides waiting for the server. As an alternative, there are a number of message-based non-blocking communication solutions. Unfortunately, these solutions were not designed to directly address the above mentioned issue of multi-threadin