From Here to There, the SOA Way

Abstract

Back in ancient times, say, around the mid ’80s when I was a grad student, distributed systems research was in its heyday. Systems like Trellis/Owl and Eden/Emerald were exploring issues in object-oriented language design, persistence, and distributed computing. One of the big themes to come out of that time period was location transparency—the idea that the way that you access an object should be independent of where it is located. That is, it shouldn’t matter whether an object is in the same process, on the same machine in a different process, or on another machine altogether. Syntactically, the way that I interact with that object is the same; I’m just invoking a method on the object.