Working with alien objects: an object oriented viewpoint

This paper describes a framework that unifies several different styles of working with distributed objects. Most systems support just one style, typically data shipping or function shipping. We show that multiple styles are necessary and reasonably straightforward to provide and integrate. The style of working with alien objects can be changed without changing the class definition and with very little effect on the application code. A different style of access makes copies of alien objects and then disconnects. Updating the copies and attempting to reflect the updates to the original objects can lead to consistency problems. This paper presents a simple, practical algorithm for reconciling conflicting updates