Distributed Objects in Java / News: Recent posts

Recently, the SharedObjects project went through a change of goals, in the sense that it is no longer focused on Internet Sockets or fast, reliable and synchronous networks to make the communicating components interact. Now we want a multiple, extensible API that could traverse firewalls, for instance, and provide a unified communication layer that could be built over sockets, or SOAP, or anything that can be wrapped into an ObjectStream.... read more

We've added two small testing applications to our files section. The first, remoteClasses, comes full with sourcecode, but all you need is to add the shob.jar file into the lib directory before you can run it. It's Swing-based, all cute, and you can play with it by running multiple instances of it and sharing objetcs with repeated names. Try having 3 of four clients for each object, and observe how they update their copies (the GUI will be notified and items will be appended to the list).... read more

A new version of SharedObjects is now available for download from the Files section. This version is much more professional and powerful than the previous one. Some improvements were made to make it easy to use the API and to develop more useful applications on top of Shob.

Full support for remote class loading is included, as well as major functionality advancements both server and client-side.

We hope to be encouraging developers to try it out and experiment with it.

I've completed the API change regarding too many exceptions thrown to the user. Now Exceptions are chained as follows:

+ CommLayerException
+-- InsecureObjectException
+-- InvalidOperationException

+ InvocationException (was already like that)
+-- java.lang.reflect.NoSuchMethodException
+-- java.lang.reflect.IllegalAccessException
+-- java.lang.reflect.IllegalArgumentException

+ ShobException
+-- AlreadySharedException
+-- NotSharedException
+-- AlreadyLockedException
+-- NotLockedException
+-- CommLayerException (?)
+-- InvocationException (?)... read more

As of today, SharedObjects (our nickname for this project) is officially on SourceForge. We are very happy with this new horizon, but the project is not really new. It started one year ago, focused on using distributed shared memory as locally shared memory, and now it's gone wider to objects in general. Although there are no release files yet, you can checkout a working version from the CVS repository. Documentation is coming shortly