Developing distributed applications by semantics-based automatic replication

A new method for developing some types of distributed applications is presented. The main idea is to provide a generic tool by which a non-distributed service object can be developed into a replicated service object automatically, to provide the corresponding distributed service. A service object implements some abstract data types that can be accessed only by invoking the operations exported in its public interface. A replicated service object is implemented by a number of identical service objects running on different nodes in a network. Two challenges of our work are to exploit the semantics of service operations to maintain the replicated service object consistency, and to develop the replicated service object automatically