Distributed application framework for large scale distributed systems

Abstract

The author introduces an infrastructure to develop large scale distributed applications, called the distributed application framework (DAF). With DAF, services provided by a distributed system are implemented as individual shared libraries that could be linked and loaded into a running process. A generic server is able to dynamically link these libraries to provide those services to its clients. To manage services in a system, DAF applies the notion of name space used by distributed file systems. That is, each server provides a Unix-filesystem-like name space to name and manage available services. The result is that managing services on a server is similar to handling files on a file system. A prototype of DAF has been implemented on top of Sun OS 4.1 using the Sun remote procedure call (RPC), external data representation (XDR), and dynamic linker.<>