Conch: Experimenting with Enhanced Name Management for Persistent Object Systems

The name management capabilities currently provided by most existing persistent object systems (POSs) are rather limited. In particular, existing POSs tend to lack powerful and general mechanisms for forming, manipulating, controlling and reasoning about contexts. As a result, these POSs offer only weak or awkward support for large-scale data storage, multi-user computing, code reuse, interoperation of independently developed object stores and other similarly important classes of applications. As part of our work on improved name management for convergent computing systems, we have developed a framework for uniform treatment of the context and interface control facets of name management. In this paper we describe a realization of that framework, in the form of a shell-style user interface to a POS, that we are using to experiment both with the framework itself and with enhanced context control capabilities for POSs.