FlexiFrag: A design pattern for flexible file sharing in distributed collaborative applications

The need for exible le sharing in distributed systems is increasing in applications such as calendar management, collaborative editing of documents, collabor-ative software developments etc. The le sharing policies required in these applications are often very diierent from the traditional read/write policies. Hence, a exible way of specifying and implementing sharing policies on individual les in le systems is required. We propose a distributed object-based system model of constructing le systems. The Object-based system model is based on a pattern called FlexiFrag. We show how a distributed object-based system and in particular distributed le system can be constructed using the pattern in a exible way.