On patterns for practical fault tolerant software in Java

Fault tolerance is important for both sequential and distributed software, and particularly so for long-running applications. The ability to stop an application and restart it, with minimal lost work, is especially useful. If components of the application can be restarted on arbitrary hosts, so much the better. In this paper, we explore Java's potential to support fault tolerant software design. We note that while there are "deficiencies" in these facilities, a little creativity can still yield solutions that would be quite difficult in other programming environments. The main contributions of the paper are several preliminary fault tolerant programming design patterns, aimed at easing the burden of application programmers who must write completely portable fault tolerant applications. This class of applications is growing, as Internet-domain software becomes increasingly prevalent. We expect that with further development the proposed patterns will be applicable to a wide range of sequential and parallel applications.