I would never suggest that distributed computing does not work.  In
particular it works much better in a closely located cluster type
configuration as GemStone is typically set up.  I would not want to use
GemStone or any other transparent distribution system over the public
internet or other WAN system.  Also, if the network starts to have
reliability issues GemStone or other transparent systems recover far less
successfully than do explicitly distributed systems.  A system built of
communicating systems can deal with outages and gracefully degrade functions
until the connection is again available.  Transparent systems generally fail
to do this acceptably.

Michael


> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-
> bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of goran at krampe.se
> Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2006 11:11 AM
> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> Subject: Re: Everything is a distributed object
> 
> 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