Atomic Object Factory: Efficient, Consistent and Dependable Support for Distributed Objects

This paper introduces Atomic Object Factory (AOF), a novel implementation of the distributed object paradigm. AOF allows client applications to transparently manipulate and share remotely-stored objects, while providing strong guarantees on dependability, consistency and persistence. It leverages the support of a listenable key-value store (LKVS), a novel NoSQL storage abstraction that we introduce in this paper. AOF offers integrated language support at the application-facing interface tier. Its middle tier implements the distributed object functionalities atop the LKVS, including coordinated replication. AOF does not rely on a mapping phase and deals with objects end-to-end. It allows the composition of these objects and provide efficient access to their methods. In particular, AOF guarantees disjoint access parallelism: operations on distinct distribued objects make use of distinct LKVS components and execute in parallel. We assess the benefits of our approach in practice by comparing the implementation of a personal cloud storage service using AOF, to an implementation of the same application with a state-of-the-art object-relational mapping over a sharded PostgreSQL database. Our results show that AOF offers a simpler programming framework both in terms of learning time and lines of code, while performing better on average and being more scalable.