The FRIENDS system developed at LAAS-CNRS is a metalevel architecture providing libraries of metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communications and group-based distributed applications. The use of metaobjects provides a nice separation of concerns between mechanisms and applications. Metaobjects can be used transparently by applications and can be composed according to the needs of a given application, a given architecture and its underlying properties. In FRIENDS, metaobjects are used recursively to add new properties to applications. They are designed using an object oriented design method and implemented on top of basic system services. This paper describes the FRIENDS software-based architecture, the objectoriented development of metaobjects, the experiments that we have done and summarises the advantages and drawbacks of a metaobject approach for building fault tolerant systems.
The FRIENDS REF system aims to provide mechanisms for building fault-tolerant applications in a flexible way through the use of libraries of metaobjects.
A Metaobject Architecture for Fault Tolerant Distributed Systems: The FRIENDS Approach
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Computer Science