SPyRO: Simple Python Remote Objects

Abstract

Remote object management is a key element in distributed and collaborative information retrieval, peer-to-peer systems and agent oriented programming. In existing implementations the communication and parsing overhead represents a significant fraction of the overall latency time in information retrieval tasks. Furthermore, existing architectures are composed of several software layers with potential version conflicts. In this paper, we present SPyRO (simple Python remote objects) which is a Python remote object management system developed to provide transparent and translucent remote object access. The transparent mode is designed to create easily distributed applications supporting code mobility (Fuggetta et al., 1998) in Python programming language, whilst the translucent mode is designed to provide total control over remote calls, and allow access from other programming languages. To lower the communication latency, the connection is stateless, local objects and remote calls are not aware of the connection state. The protocol uses several marshal formats to communicate between peers, trying to maximize the homogeneity in a heterogeneous network. To support our claims we present results showing performance improvements of about 10 times when comparing with state of the art marshalling formats based on XML