Design of a distributed object manager for the Smalltalk-80 system

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a distributed object manager which allows several Smalltalk-80 systems to share objects over a local-area network. This object manager is based on the following principles: location transparency and uniform object naming, unique object representation and use of symbolic links for remote access, possibility of object migration and distributed garbage collection. A version of the object manager has been implemented and is currently being integrated on a two nodes configuration.