Mobile objects in distributed Oz

TLDR

Designing distributed applications raises difficult mobility questions about what information to transfer, when, and how, and network‑transparent distribution alone does not address these issues. The study proposes extending all language entities with a network behavior that gives programmers simple, predictable control over communication patterns to enable efficient distributed programming. This extension gives objects arbitrary mobility independent of their definition, avoids forwarding chains through intermediate sites, and is implemented as an extension to the publicly available DFKI Oz 2.0 system. The implementation in Distributed Oz preserves the same syntax and semantics for objects whether used as stationary servers, mobile agents, or caches, and is proven network transparent.

Abstract

Some of the most difficult questions to answer when designing a distributed application are related to mobility: what information to transfer between sites and when and how to transfer it. Network-transparent distribution, the property that a program's behavior is independent of how it is partitioned among sites, does not directly address these questions. Therefore we propose to extend all language entities with a network behavior that enables efficient distributed programming by giving the programmer a simple and predictable control over network communication patterns. In particular, we show how to give objects an arbitrary mobility behavior that is independent of the objects definition. In this way, the syntax and semantics of objects are the same regardless of whether they are used as stationary servers, mobile agents, or simply as caches. These ideas have been implemented in Distributed Oz, a concurrent object-oriented language that is state aware and has dataflow synchronization. We prove that the implementation of objects in Distributed Oz is network transparent. To satisfy the predictability condition, the implementation avoids forwarding chains through intermediate sites. The implementation is an extension to the publicly available DFKI Oz 2.0 system.