Julep: an Environment for the Evaluation of

Julep is an object-oriented testbed designed for implementation and analysis of process recovery protocols. It is written in Java, and runs as a layer underneath a Java-based distributed application. Only minor modifications to a typical distributed application are necessary to use Julep as a communication mechanism. Julep is designed to allow new process recovery mechanisms to be quickly incorporated, permitting accurate comparison between mechanisms for specific distributed applications on specific hardware platforms. A novel aspect of Julep is its UDP-based object communication service, which implements “unbreakable” communication channels. Julep can be used as a testbed to compare the performance of particular recovery mechanisms, as a framework within which new recovery mechanisms can be implemented and tested, or as an infrastructure to make existing distributed applications fault tolerant. In its most basic form, Julep can be used as a reliable object-based communication service.