The object-oriented advantage in prototyping a remote file system

The authors have prototyped a remote file system for the Choices object-oriented operating system that permits the caching strategy to be user selectable on a per file basis. Choices provides a convenient object-oriented toolkit for building file systems, which they employed, reusing code whenever possible. The client provides the driving force in the architecture. The server maintains a small cache, fulfills requests, and performs callbacks. The client supports both whole file caching and block caching. Only the client needs to be aware of the type of caching being used for a particular file. Different clients can provide different caching strategies at the same time but the data within a client it is kept consistent. The server and client cooperate to maintain the consistency of the file system via callbacks. Because of the object-oriented architecture of the Choices file system they were able to prototype the system in approximately 6 weeks. There was a significant amount of code reuse