We present a novel view of the structuring of distributed systems, and a few examples of its utilization in an object-oriented context. In a distributed system, the structure of a service or subsystem may be complex, being implemented as a set of communicating server objects; however, this complexity of structure should not be apparent to the client. In our proposal, a client must first acquire a local object, called a proxy, in order to use such a service. The proxy represents the whole set of servers. The client directs all its communication to the proxy. The proxy, and all the objects it represents, collectively form one distributed object, which is not decomposable by the client. Any higher-level communication protocols are internal to this distributed object. Such a view provides a powerful structuring framework for distributed systems; it can be implemented cheaply without sacrificing much flexibility. It subsumes may previous proposals, but encourages better information-hiding and encapsulation. 1

1 Research objectives and approach Large-scale distributed computing systems are central to our modern economies, witness the Internet, cloud computing, peer-to-peer computing, parallel computing, nomadic and pervasive computing, etc. Advances in this area impact the economics and user experience of large segments of society. My research focus is on sharing and updating information in large-scale distributed systems, i.e., ones with high latency, subject to partial failures, and comprising large amounts of data. This is relevant to, for instance, enterprise intranets, social or co-operative networks, distributed databases, and mobile computing. 2