Application configuration in a client-server distributed system

This paper discusses the configuration of clients and servers in a distributed system. The question addressed is how does a client choose a appropriate server instance for invocation. It is assumed that a number of server instances are available in the distributed system, each instance having different characteristics that the client may wish to optimise. To examine the issues in this configuration and resource management problem the authors build an object model containing clients ad servers. Using this model they examine the whole decision making process through the lifecycle of object design, implementation, and instantiation in a distributed system