Introduction to CORK

The Content Object Replication Kit (CORK) is a toolkit designed to support replication of Java objects across virtual machines on the same or different hosts. Replicated objects provide an alternative abstraction for building distributed systems, and collaborative systems in particular. Multiple clients can retrieve replicas of a given Object, and changes made to any one of the replicas will be propagated to all other replicas. "Master" replicas are also written to non-volatile storage in case of client, server, or network failure.

A primary design goal of CORK has been the ability to replicate objects from a variety of (unmodified) classes. This is achieved by attaching listeners to objects to detect events that signal object modifications, and then translating those events into intellegent messages that include the logic for reproducing the modification on a remote replica. CORK includes flexible security support, providing pluggable fine-grained control over replica visibility, retrieval, and modification. Flexible support for object storage is also included, allowing custom storage implementations to be added. A more detailed high-level overview of CORK is available in "Supporting Interactive Collaboration on the Web with CORK".

CORK has been developed as the infrastructure for two collaborative systems, the Virtual School software used by the Learning in Networked Communities (LiNC) project and a graphical virtual environment, based on the geography of Blacksburg, Virginia, called MOOsburg.

This site describes important CORK classes and concepts, then provides an example of using CORK to replicate a Java Bean.

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Last modified 5/22/03 4:03 PM by isenhour (history)
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