Integrating Remote Invocation and Distributed Shared State

Most distributed applications require, at least conceptually, some sort of shared state: information that is nonstatic but mostly read, and needed at more than one site. At the same time, RPC-based systems such as Sun RPC, Java RMI, CORBA, and .NET have become the de facto standards by which distributed applications communicate. As a result, shared state tends to be implemented either through the redundant transmission of deep-copy RPC parameters or through ad-hoc, application-specific caching and coherence protocols. The former option can waste large amounts of bandwidth; the latter significantly complicates program design and maintenance