Design and Implementation of the I K Remote Invocation Service

The IK programming environment was designed to ease the development of distributed applications which use object-oriented concepts. The IK Run Time Support solves most of the problems introduced by distribution, such as locating and accessing objects, translating between di erent data representations or even between di erent object programming languages. This paper describes the design and implementation of the remote invocationmechanism in the IK platform. It begins by identifying the problems found when adapting the Remote Procedure Call mechanism to the object model. Next, it makes a brief description of the object and computational models in IK and proceeds by explaining the solutions for the invocation of remote objects in this platform. Finally, it concludes about the virtues and limitations of these solutions. K is one implementation of the COMANDOS 1 generic model. Recently K was selected as the Object Oriented platform in HARNESS 2 project.