Caching in an object oriented system

Caching is an important technique for improving performance in distributed systems. However, in general it has been performed on an ad-hoc basis, with each component of the system having to invent its own caching techniques. In the Spring operating system we provide a unified caching architecture that can be used to cache a variety of different kinds of remote objects. For any given kind of object, this architecture lets different client processes within a single machine share a single cache for accessing remote objects. This caching is performed by a separate cacher process on the machine local to client processes, the caching is transparent to the clients, and the cached information is kept coherent. This architecture has been used to implement caching for files and for naming contexts