Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Roderick J McChesney

Arthur A Van Hoff

Maurice Balick

Gregory B Nuyens

A computer system in a distributed object programming environment includes a number of host computers providing services to clients on a network through internally stored servers. Various types of configuration information for each server are available to clients through persistent server administrators, which are objects containing such information about individual servers. A server administrator can store such information as startup execution definitions, saved program definition, object interfaces and implementations, reaping, tracing, and logging configuration data. Being persistent and external to the server, the server administrator can manipulate and determine its information about a server in response to client requests without starting up the server, thereby facilitating system administration.

System and method for determining and manipulating configuration

A networked computer system contains a number of host computers with servers that provide various functionality to distributed clients on the network. Clients are able to access runtime information about servers on remote host computers, even where the clients have only object references to the servers through the presence of an embedded first class object within each server process. The first class object can be used to determine the process identification of the server process, counts of active objects and implementations in the server process, and to control tracing and logging functions provided by application programming interfaces utilized by the server.

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Redwood City, CA, United States of America

Roderick J McChesney