Patent ID: 6895587

Claim:
In an object-oriented computer system comprising a plurality of execution environments and including an object having an executable method defined by class source code far a class, wherein said abject is instantiated from said class, a method of managing said abject at runtime to dynamically respond to system processing load requirements, said method comprising: (a) identifying requests to migrate said object back and forth between a split status and a merged status to respond to said system load requirements, said split status comprising said abject having at least two instances for handling a first system load requirement, and said merged status comprising said object having fewer instances for handling second system load requirement, wherein said at least two instances are distributed among at least two execution environments of said plurality of execution and wherein said at least two execution environments are heterogeneous in hardware and operating system; and (b) transparently and repeatedly migrating, at run-time, said object back and forth between said split status and said merged status, wherein said object is instantiated from said class a same way using a common object identifier, despite said object having one of a split status and a merged status.