IMMD IV Home Up Help Ja - Apr 19, 1999

RepliXa - A Framework for Transparent and Adaptable Object Replication

Overview

In recent years it became more and more important to deal with object replication. This is because on the one hand replication is an important technology to improve the fault tolerance, reliability, availability and performance of a Distributed System. On the other hand object oriented concepts become more and more important in the development of Distributed Systems.

RepliXa is a framework which enables the programmer to use object replication in a transparent and adaptable manner. The main goal of RepliXa was to enable the programmer to develop his application in two steps. First he develops only his application, maybe even in a not distributed system, and then he adapts his application to the distributed environment. It is clear that this adaptation should be as easy as possible.

To achieve this easy adaptability the concept of meta-programming is used. This concept helps to separate program-code which belongs to the application from program-code which is necessary to replicate objects. This enables a flexible combination of objects and replication-strategies.

The RepliXa framework provides a remote method invocation, an active replication-strategy and a passive replication-strategy. The RMI can be used to access methods of remote objects. The advantage of the active replication-strategy is that it can be used to replicate graphical components and the advantage of the passive replication-strategy is that it is fault tolerant.

At the moment RepliXa should only be used for research purpose, because there was not enough time to implement all necessary components. For example a distributed garbage collector is not implemented up to now.

API Documentation

Prototype implementation

Publications and Reports