Encapsulating distribution by remote objects

Middleware for modern office environments and many other application areas needs to provide support for a myriad of different, highly mobile objects. At the same time, it should be able to scale to vast numbers of objects that may possibly be dispersed over a large wide-area network. The combination of flexibility and scalability requires support for object-specific solutions that is hardly addressed by current object-based systems such as CORBA. We have developed a middleware solution that seamlessly integrates traditional remote objects with physically distributed objects that can fully encapsulate their own distribution strategy. We describe how this integration takes place, and how it can be applied to existing systems such as CORBA.