Towards a world-wide civilization of objects

The Internet today corresponds to a Feudal society, where fortress walls (firewalls) surround villages (LANs), little pockets of civilization connected by lawless highways (insecure networks) infested by bandits (hackers). The emergence of the World Wide Web and Java have shown the way towards a true civilization of electronic objects, although it does not yet exist. To assist in its evolution, we propose to extend the World Wide Web and Java with object-oriented, distributed OS services, implemented in Java. The goal is to make it commonplace for applications and objects to be distributed across unrelated sites and for mobile objects and agents to travel and trade freely around the world. We describe some problems such a system faces, such as in the areas of security and performance, and give a high-level design that addresses them.