Experience with developing services for highly-distributed applications

Hermes is an experimental project to evaluate the architecture and services appropriate for the construction of scalable, highly distributed applications. Many of these applications need to transfer data and control between dispersed users, for instance, forms and files between the functionaries (humans and automated tools) that need to process them. These applications are modeled as collections of mobile objects, each encapsulating both state and the operations on the state, and each able to move between the nodes of the functionaries. Discussed here are the distributed services for communication, migration, and logical routing developed at the user level in the Hermes system