A reflective invocation scheme to realise advanced object management

The integration of the notion of distribution in an object-oriented language not only introduces a need for location independent object invocation but also has to cope with various object management operations. These meta-operations include object migration, object replication and granularity control. Additionally, in a multithreaded environment, the concurrency control specifications defined on an object by the application programmer must be realised correctly. Our object invocation scheme offers mechanisms for realising these management operations and concurrency control transparently. This scheme-based on reference objectsis generic in the sense that it can be extented to realise some additional object management operations currently not supported by our prototype. This prototype is realised in a C++ environment on various distributed memory platforms.