Programming with Live Distributed Objects

A component revolution is underway, bringing developers improved productivity and opportunities for code reuse. However, whereas existing tools work incredibly well on the desktop or for client-server structured systems, support for other styles of distributed applications has lagged. In this paper, we propose a new programming paradigm and a platform, in which instances of distributed protocols are modeled as “live distributed objects”. Live objects can represent both protocols and higher-level components. They look and feel much like ordinary objects, but can maintain shared state and synchronization across multiple different machines within a network. Live objects can be composed in a type-safe manner to build sophisticated distributed applications using a simple, intuitive “drag and drop” interface, very often without writing any code or having to understand the intricacies of the underlying distributed algorithms.