Dynamically Configurable Distributed Objects

The continued growth and widespread deployment of gigabit networks and high-speed network protocols will provide significant communications bandwidth between increasingly powerful computers, enabling systems containing billions of objects and millions of machines. Harnessing the power of this vast array of raw hardware requires well-organized complex software, highly scalable algorithms and services, and effective abstraction of complexity. Wide area distributed object computing systems, which model the system’s components–applications, hardware, programs, users, etc.–as objects, are capable of meeting this challenge. This dissertation contributes to an important aspect of wide-area distributed object computing research; it provides a model and a mechanism for dynamic software evolution and re-use.