Object invocation in the COMET open distributed system: the dialogue model

This paper presents COMET, a Common Object Management Environment, that investigates basic problems associated with distributed computing in an internet environment with mobile objects. COMET offers a uniform invocation model, based on dialogues, that integrates both communication and execution aspects. On the communication side, dialogues support asynchronous invocation with preservation of causal relationships. Applications can thus take advantage of the increased parallelism that is possible in a distributed environment. Furthermore COMET´s invocation model supports multiple object flavors, offering high-level functionality, s.a. persistence, replication and atomicity. This is realized by modeling invocations as flavor-specific actions, that manipulate typed memory. Reflective techniques are used to dynamically adjust dialogue algorithms according to object flavor