Replicated Object Management Using Group Technology

The ROMANCE project aims at building a Repli-cated Object MANagement Conngurable Environment based on Group Technology. Ultimately, we aim to develop a programming environment to support sharing passive replicated data objects regardless of data persistence or durability requirements. ROMANCE objects are distributed and can be accessed from any node in the system (in a location transparent way). Object access can be implemented either by issuing remote invocations or by maintaining a local copy of the object. Thus, shared objects may be replicated, both in volatile storage, in the context of user processes, and/or in stable memory. Additionally , ROMANCE intends to provide support for fault-tolerance and controlled inconsistency of object replicas in the presence of network partitions. This paper details the goals of the ROMANCE project, presents its software architecture and current status. A fundamental goal of the project is to experiment with Group Technology. In ROMANCE, distribution and replication are implemented using underlying group communication and membership services. The paper also describes how these tools are used to achieve ROMANCE goals.