Toward a programming model for building reliable systems with distributed state

We present the preliminary design of a programming model for building reliable systems with distributed state from collections of potentially unreliable components. Our transactor model provides constructs for maintaining consistency among the states of distributed components. Our intention is that transactors should support key aspects of both traditional distributed transactions, e.g., for electronic commerce, and systems with weaker consistency requirements, e.g., peer-to-peer file- and process-sharing systems. In this paper, we motivate the need for language support for maintenance of distributed state, describe the design goals for the transactor model, provide an operational semantics for a simple transactor calculus, and provide several examples of applications of the transactor model in a higher-level language. © 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.