Design Principles for Dynamic Object Systems

Dynamic distributed object systems (e.g. Jini, Salutation) are a new generation of distributed object middleware that enable the system to adapt its configuration during runtime. Those kind of middleware exist, but without any appropriate design principles or methodologies. In this short paper we give a brief introduction into this kind of systems and the differences to classic distributed object systems. In the following we list the main problems that show up in the design process of dynamic distributed systems and propose some abstraction levels that help.