Distributed application framework for large scale distributed systems

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.<>