Expressive and Extensible Parameter Passing for Distributed Object Systems

In modern distributed object systems, reference parameters to a remote method are passed ac-cording to their runtime type. This design choice limits the expressiveness, readability, and maintainability of distributed applications. Further, to extend the built-in set of parameter passing semantics of a distributed object system, the programmer has to understand and modify the underlying middleware implementation. To address these design shortcomings, this paper presents: A declarative and extensible approach to remote parameter passing that decouples parameter passing semantics from parameter types, and a plugin-based framework, DeXteR, which enables the programmer to extend the built-in set of remote parameter passing semantics, without having to understand or modify the underlying middleware implementation.