Globe: A Wide-Area Distributed System
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We describe the architecture of the entire system for distributed shared objects. This includes an outline of what a distributed object is, but also the basic support services for naming and locating objects. This is a good introductory paper to the Globe system.
In this paper, we concentrate on the application of distributed shared objects by discussing a middleware solution for building worldwide distributed Web services. The basic idea is to implement a Web document (i.e., a collection of logically related Web pages, their images, icons, etc.) as a distributed shared object. In this way, we can attach a replication policy to each document separately that matches the consistency requirements of that document. Also check out the separate Globule page.
We describe a naming and location service which is based on a worldwide search tree that adapts dynamically to individual migration patterns. The solution exploits an object's relative stability with respect to a region, and combines that with the use of pointer caches. The architecture of the location service is presented, including update and lookup mechanisms.