Electra - Making Distributed Programs Object-Oriented

Building failure-resilient, distributed software is difficult. In this paper we describe abstractions which help the programmer in developing such software systems by means of object-oriented programming. An object-oriented toolkit called Electra is presented, which provides abstractions for Remote Method Calling (RMC), object-groups, object-group communication with type checking, object-location trading and so forth. Electra allows the building of failure-resilient, directly distributed systems by reusing software components. With a simple example we demonstrate how a distributed, faulttolerant client-server application can be realized in Electra.