System and method for storage of shared persistent objects

The preferred embodiment of the present invention facilitates the creation, storage and interaction of persistent objects using single level storage semantics on commodity systems. The preferred method and apparatus utilize a persistence mechanism to provide object persistence. In particular, the persistence mechanism defines a Factory class, a Finder class, an ExpandingContainer class, a Container class and a ClassLoader class which work together to create persistent shared objects. An application can create persistent objects by calling methods on the Factory class. The Factory class then works in conjunction with an instance of the Container class and the ClassLoader class to create persistent objects in a shared address space (SAS). Shared address space is a persistent virtual address space shared by all processes running on a computer system. The SAS allows the processes to access data within SAS at any time, using a SAS address.