The flying object for an open distributed environment

Abstract

We propose the flying object that adapts itself to the environment by means of a dynamic behavior change mechanism. The flying object is a user-defined, first-class and abstract entity. Such properties provide independency and transparency. The flying object model establishes a unique decomposition of the flying object. In this model, the flying object consists of four objects: the delegater that encapsulates the implementation, the message handler that interprets the messages, the event handler that provides adaptation strategies and the context object that holds a state beyond the adaptation. The ability of accommodation, the openness, is one of the great contributions of this model because many functions such as object migration, load balancing, distributed transaction management, the communication protocols and even adaptation strategies can be introduced by the message handler and the event handler as a plug-in module. Furthermore, a source code translation technique is introduced for automatic decomposition of the flying object as a replacement for the virtual machine customizations or low-level programming. The delegater and the context object are instantiated from the same translated class to minimize maintenance costs of classes as a result of an automatic translation. Therefore, the system organized by the flying object is best suited for the open distributed environment.