The ROMANCE approach to Replicated Object
Management.
status: 2nd version
Luís Rodrigues and Paulo Veríssimo
A shorter version of this report was published in the
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed
Computing Systems, Lisboa, Portugal, September, 1993.
Abstract
The ROMANCE project aims at building a Replicated Object MANagement
Configurable Environment based on Group Technology. Ultimately, we aim
to develop a programming environment to support sharing passive
replicated data objects regardless of data persistence or durability
requirements. ROMANCE objects are distributed and can be accessed from
any node in the system (in a location transparent way). Object access
can be implemented either by issuing remote invocations or by
maintaining a local copy of the object. Thus, shared objects may be
replicated, both in volatile storage, in the context of user
processes, and/or in stable memory. Additionally, ROMANCE intends to
provide support for fault-tolerance and controlled inconsistency of
object replicas in the presence of network partitions.
This paper details the goals of the ROMANCE project, presents its
software architecture and current status. A fundamental goal of the
project is to experiment with Group Technology. In ROMANCE,
distribution and replication are implemented using underlying group
communication and membership services. The paper also describes how
these tools are used to achieve ROMANCE goals.
Also available extended report (gzip postscript), (pdf) .
Luís Rodrigues