DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A DISTRIBUTED OBJECT NAMING HIERARCHY FOR THE METASYSTEM WADE

WADE is an object-oriented metacomputing system developed by the authors on a networked campus. The WADE distributed object model （WDOM） provides dependable and consistent access to wide area resources with heterogeneity on WADE. WDOM is implemented using a four-level object naming hierarchy. Firstly, the user-level objects are mapped by object naming agents to system-level, unique, location-independent names called SOID. And then, if communication between hosts is essential, system-level objects will be bound to communication-level names called COID. Finally, objects in inert are stored into the persistent storage devices such as hard disks with object identifier named POID. The object names such as SOID and COID are cached in term of LRU strategy so that the efficiency of the object operations is improved. Some tests show that the object naming hierarchy can improve expansibility and efficiency of metasystems.