The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 11, 2000
Filed:
Jul. 01, 1996
Mark S Miller, Los Altos, CA (US);
Norman Hardy, Portola Valley, CA (US);
E Dean Tribble, Los Altos Hills, CA (US);
Christopher T Hibbert, Mountain View, CA (US);
Eric C Hill, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
A system and method is disclosed that provides persistent capabilities for distributed, object-oriented applications running on generally available hardware. The disclosed system and method operate in a transparent distributed object system where inter-process messaging between the program objects is effected by paired transport managers, proxies and matched in-table and out-table slots. Each object needing to communicate with an object in another address space does so by transparently issuing messages to that object's local proxy. Each process provides a registrar that includes a secret code table wherein an object is registered with a unique, practically unguessable secret code. Anticipating the need to re-establish object-proxy links following a inter-process communications fault, proxies are made revivable, meaning that their links with corresponding remote objects can be revived following a communications interruption. This is accomplished by a makeRevivable method that stores a revivable proxy's expiration date (the date beyond which the proxy is not revivable) and its corresponding remote object's secret code into the proxy's out-table slot. Upon the occurrence of a communications fault, all transport managers and tables are nulled out and then, when the communications fault is corrected, rebuilt by the transport managers. Sometime after the restoration of communications, a revived method is invoked that restores the links between, registered objects and proxies. The objects and proxies are brought back in a consistent state based on limited checkpointed data stored by the distributed program for the registered objects.