Replicated Web Objects: Design and Implementation

The Web currently suffers from a number of scalability problems. While general caching techniques can be used to help some, the vast number of different resources now available requires an alternative approach. In particular, we need to develop resourcespecific strategies. Such an approach is not supported in the current Web infrastructure. Also, the current Web is limited in flexibility with regards to integration of new resources and services. This is partly caused by the rigid nature of the HTTP protocol. We introduce Web objects as a way to address these problems. Web objects are worldwide scalable distributed shared objects that represent Web resources. Each such object provides at least a common interface and encapsulates and implements its own distribution policy. In this paper we concentrate on the design of these Web objects as well as their implementation in Java.