Globe: A Wide-Area Distributed System

  • Authors:
  • Maarten van Steen;Philip Homburg;Andrew S. Tanenbaum

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Concurrency
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Developing large-scale wide-area applications requires an infrastructure that is presently lacking. Currently, most Internet applications have to be built on top of raw communication services, such as TCP connections. All additional services, including those for naming, replication, migration, persistence, fault tolerance, and security, have to be implemented for each application anew. Not only is this a waste of effort, it also makes interoperability between different applications difficult or even impossible. The authors present a novel, object-based framework for developing wide-area distributed applications. The framework is based on the concept of a distributed shared object, which has the characteristic feature that its state can be physically distributed across multiple machines at the same time. All implementation aspects, including communication protocols, replication strategies, and distribution and migration of state, are part of each object and are hidden behind its interface. The current performance problems of the World-Wide Web are taken as an example to illustrate the benefit of encapsulating state, operations, and implementation strategies on a per-object basis. The authors describe how distributed objects can be used to implement worldwide scalable Web documents.