Hi!

Martin Drautzburg <Martin.Drautzburg at web.de> wrote:
> The more I think of it, the more I think Michael Latta is right: "you need to 
> know when you are talking to a remote object and handle that differently than 
> those in memory".  Even if we could implement a shared object memory, that 
> would still not solve all problems. 

The "truth" about transparent networking is a rather "old" one by now.
BUT... the shared object memory has already been implemented and used
successfully since 1985 in the Smalltalk community IMHO. It is called
GemStone.

So sure, distributing objects is hard and if you rely on "simplistic"
methods like using fine grained RPC (or whatever we can call all these
variations on the theme: CORBA, RMI, SOAP, yaddayadda) - then it can get
quite nasty.

GemStone uses a highly advanced "paged" object memory (about 8k per page
IIRC) with typically a page cache process running on each participating
node. And then a transactional model on top, similar to how most OODBs
work I suppose - like Magma for instance.

Distributed over the Internet? No, typically not. But it is still highly
distributed and proven successful in quite large systems.

And no - it doesn't solve "all problems". :)

regards, Göran