Distributed Adapters Pattern: A Design Pattern for Object-Oriented Distributed Applications

In order to accomplish their tasks, components in a distributed system communicate with each other by means of an inter-process communication mechanism. When the components handle communication themselves we obtain applications where the core functionality of its components is interwoven with communication tasks. Therefore, the application becomes dependent on a particular communication mechanism, and its components are hard to reuse and extend. In order to illustrate the use of DAP, we take a banking example as a concrete context. The banking service stores entities such as account and customer records, and has operations for manipulating these entities, such as deposit and addAccount. These operations are to be provided remotely to clients of the service, and thus its implementation must rely on a distribution platform. Additionally, it is expected that such implementation follows an incremental method: a non-distributed version is implemented before the distributed one. Another assumption is that it may be desirable to change the distribution platform.