A World-Wide Distributed System Using Java and the Internet

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a distributed system built using Java that supports peer-to-peer communication among processes spread across a network. We identify the requirements of a software layer that supports distributed computing, and we propose a design that meets those requirements. Our primary concern is the identification, specification, and implementation of software components that can be composed in different ways to develop correct distributed applications. Though our implementation uses Java, the fundamental ideas apply to any object-oriented language that supports messaging and threads.