Doorastha A step towards distribution transparency

Compared to centralized programming, writing applications with current distribution platforms like RMI or CORBA is quite difficult, because it requires several special considerations. For example, “normal” Java has referential semantics, objects are accessed and passed to methods through references. We would certainly like to keep these clear semantics in the case of a distributed application, too. With the standard Java distribution platform (RMI) however, objects used as arguments in a remote method invocation are by default copied to the remote site. This obviously will affect the program’s semantics, if the programmer is not aware of the difference. In this paper we present the Doorastha system which allows to configure a centralized program for a distributed environment transparently, while preserving the Java semantics and allowing fine-grained distribution policies.