ORTHOGONAL PERSISTENCE IN A HETEROGENEOUS DISTRIBUTED OBJECT-ORIENTEDENVIRONMENT

This paper describes the major issues in the design and implementation of orthogonal persistence in IK. A single and uniform programming par adigm is used to manipulate objects in a persistent and distributed en vironment. Object references can be freely passed during remote invoca tions or stored persistently. IK supports orthogonal persistence with type inheritance. Objects are stored persistently when reachable from an Eternal Root, regardless of their type. For programmers, objects ar e created and manipulated uniformly, independently of the time they pe rsist. Persistent objects are dynamically grouped at run-time into clu sters to encapsulate fine-grain language level objects into coarser-gr ain entities. We present a novel approach to integrate object clusteri ng, naming and garbage collection in persistent systems, and present e xperimental results.