Objects, Replication and Decoupled Communication in Distributed Environments

Decoupled communication has proven tobeapowerful paradigm for the implementation of applications in the context of open distributed environments. We hav e developed the Object Space approach which integrates that communication style with object-oriented techniques. It allows encapsulation of protocols for interactions in distributed applications into classes, thus providing a new lev el ofabstraction. Besides an example application here we describe how decoupled communication as supported by the Object Space may be efficiently implemented in distributed environments. We briefly evaluate our prototypical implementation and develop a more efficient solution. This implementation is itself distributed. It runs on top of UNIX systems connected by a LAN. 1