Hiding distributed complexities: attribute based programming

This paper advocates a strongly typed object oriented system to shield the programmer from the complexities of availability and reliability. This system is based on attributes, typed objects, protocol composition and subtyping. The object type is encapsulated in every method invocation. This allows the system to intercept these invocations and invoke a meta-object that implements replication. The protocol composition property allows the construction of different protocol stacks based on the object attribute. The approach presented does not make any assumptions regarding the language used by the programmer. A programmer for this system tags his object with the desired attributes to attain the required functionality. For example, a programmer wishing to replicate his object tags his object with the replica attribute and provides a non-replicated implementation. Then it is the system, not the programmer that calls the replication meta-object. In short, there are no new application programmer interfaces (API) to learn for the programmer