The design of a universal class store

Persistent object stores have invoked much interest in recent years with the combination of the concepts of an object repository and the reuse of code and class definitions. One such store implemented at the University of Cape Town (UCT), exhibits the problems underlying most of these stores in that they require to have their own environment and open their own operating system, thus making them inaccessible to users on standard computer systems. Perhaps the most efficient methods of implementing such stores, in modern large address space computers uses memory mapping and distributed shared memory to provide access to the object store. Whereas if the use of memory mapping for objects is very efficient in a high speed local environment it presents problems when implemented over a wide area network. One alternative approach is the access of the object store by means of remote procedure calls to an object server. This paper describes work being undertaken to combine these two approaches by using the facilities provided by the OSF DCE to provide high reliability remote access, while using the distributed shared memory paradigm to provide high speed local access. The description of the object store and the access mechanisms using DCE are described