Designing distributed applications with mobile code paradigms

Large scale distributed systems are becoming of paramount importance, due to the evolution of technology and to the interest of market. Their development, however, is not yet supported by a sound technological and methodological background, as the results developed for small size distributed systems often do not scale up. Recently, mobile code languages (MCLs) have been proposed as a technological answer to the problem. In this work, we abstract away from the details of these languages by deriving design paradigms exploiting code mobility that are independent of any particular technology. We present such design paradigms, together with a discussion of their features, their application domain, and some hints about the selection of the correct paradigm for a given distributed application.