Orthogonal Persistence in a Heterogeneous Distributed Object-Oriented Environment

This paper describes the major issues in the design and implementation of orthogonal persistence in IK. A single and uniform programming paradigm is used to manipulate objects in a persistent and distributed environment. Object references can be freely passed during remote invocations 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 are created and manipulated uniformly, independently of the time they persist. Persistent objects are dynamically grouped at run-time into clusters to encapsulate fine-grain language level objects into coarser-grain entities. We present a novel approach to integrate object clustering, naming and garbage collection in persistent systems, and present experimental results.