Implementing location independent invocation

A brief overview is presented of work on building a highly distributed office application based on mobile objects. The authors explain the techniques used to find the target of an invocation and describe how the technique is implemented. Location-independent invocation (LII) is presented as a conceptual service that is independent of any particular application, operating system, or programming language. LII completely removes remote call processing buildings from the view of application programmer. It is shown how LII can be implemented without language or system support in any environment that provides reliable interprocess communication. The indications for LII are studied, i.e. under what circumstances the proposed abstractions are beneficial. A description is given of an application domain in which LII is useful and the core services that support it. An object-finding algorithm is described. The relationship of LII to earlier work on object-finding and location independence is included.<>