Object‐oriented Programming in Peer‐to‐peer Systems

Leveraged by the success of applications aiming at the ‘free’ sharing of data in the Internet, the paradigm of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) computing has had substantial consideration devoted to it recently. This paper presents a high‐level abstraction for remote object interaction in a P2P environment, called borrow/lend (BL). We present the principles underlying our BL abstraction, and illustrate how this abstraction can be used to program P2P applications in Java. We contrast our abstraction with established abstractions for distributed programming such as the remote method invocation or the tuple space, illustrating how the BL abstraction, obviously influenced by such previous abstractions, unifies flavors of these, but also how it captures the constraints specific to P2P environments. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.