Distributed shared objects as a communication paradigm

Current paradigms for interprocess communication are not sufficient to describe the exchange of information at an adequate level of abstraction. They are either too low-level, or their implementations cannot meet performance requirements. As an alternative, we propose distributed shared objects as a unifying concept. These objects offer user-defined operations on shared state, but allow for efficient implementations through replication and distribution of state. In contrast to other object-based models, these implementation aspects are completely hidden from applications.