Generic Containers for a Distributed Object Store

In this paper we report of an experiment about how generic container classes can be used to build up a distributed main memory object store. This approach is inspired by the C++ standard template library (STL) but uses set-like associative structures instead of the array-like sequential structures mainly used by the STL. The basic structure is a container with only fundamental functionality. The only way to access the data of the elements is to apply a function to all the elements. We show how such containers can be extended to indexed sets and distributed object stores. We use Modula-3 to implement the generic classes. Experiments show that such containers form powerful building blocks especially suitable for implementing distributed containers.