Time-Independent Invocation in Java CMS

This paper describes a pragmatic approach for abstracting invocation semantics with emphasis on remote invocations. Invocation semantics, such as synchronous, asynchronous, remote, transactional or replicated, are all considered first class citizens. Using a combination of the Strategy and Decorator design patterns, we suggest an effective way to compose various invocation semantics. We completely separate the definition of a class from the invocation semantics of its methods, and we go a step further towards full polymorphism: the invocation of the same method can have different semantics on two objects of the same class. The same invocation on a given object may even vary according to the client performing the invocation. To reduce the overhead induced by the flexibility underlying our approach, we rely on just-in-time stub generation techniques.