In distributed programming, a portable object is an object

Object (computer science)

In computer science, an object is any entity that can be manipulated by the commands of a programming language, such as a value, variable, function, or data structure...

 which can be accessed through a normal method

Method (computer science)

In object-oriented programming, a method is a subroutine associated with a class. Methods define the behavior to be exhibited by instances of the associated class at program run time...

 call while possibly residing in memory on another computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

. It is portable

Portability

Portability may refer to:*Portability , the portability of social security benefits*Software portability, the portability of a piece of software to multiple platforms...

 in the sense that it moves from machine to machine, irrespective of operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 or computer architecture

Computer architecture

In computer science and engineering, computer architecture is the practical art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals and the formal modelling of those systems....

. This mobility is the end goal of many remote procedure call

Remote procedure call

In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...

 systems.

The advantage of portable objects is that they are easy to use and very expressive

Expressivity

Expressivity is a term used in genetics to refer to variations in a phenotype among individuals carrying a particular genotype. The term can be used to characterize qualitatively or quantitatively the extent of phenotypic variation given a particular genotype. The term is analogous to the...

, allowing programmer

Programmer

A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...

s to be completely unaware that objects reside in other locations. Detractors cite this as a fault, as naïve programmers will not expect network-related

Computer network

A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....

 errors or the unbounded nondeterminism

Unbounded nondeterminism

In computer science, unbounded nondeterminism or unbounded indeterminacy is a property of concurrency by which the amount of delay in servicing a request can become unbounded as a result of arbitration of contention for shared resources while still guaranteeing that the request will eventually be...

 associated with large networks.

See also

• CORBA
  Çorba
  Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...
  
   Common Object Request Broker Architecture, cross language cross platform object model
• Portable Object Adapter
  Portable Object Adapter
  Portable Object Adapter - The CORBA object responsible for splitting the server side remote invocation handler into the remote Object and its Servant. The object is exposed for the remote invocations, while the servant contains the methods that are actually handling the requests...
  
   part of the CORBA standard
• Freedesktop.org
  Freedesktop.org
  freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software desktop environments for the X Window System on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat in March 2000.The organisation focuses on the user....
  
   D-Bus
  D-Bus
  In computing, D-Bus is a simple inter-process communication open-source system for software applications to communicate with one another. Heavily influenced by KDE2–3's DCOP system, D-Bus has replaced DCOP in the KDE 4 release. An implementation of D-Bus supports most POSIX operating...
  
   current open cross language cross platform Object Model
• GNOME
  GNOME
  GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
  
   Bonobo
  Bonobo (computing)
  Bonobo is a component model for creating reusable software components and compound documents. It was created by the company Ximian for compound documents used in GNOME....
  
   deprecated GNOME cross language Object Model
• KDE
  KDE
  KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...
  
   DCOP
  DCOP
  DCOP, which stands for Desktop COmmunication Protocol, is a light-weight interprocess and software componentry communication system. The main point of this system is to allow applications to interoperate, and to share complex tasks...
  
   deprecated KDE interprocess and software componentry communication system
• KDE
  KDE
  KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...
  
   KPart deprecated KDE component framework
• XPCOM
  XPCOM
  XPCOM is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla. It is similar to Microsoft COM and CORBA. It has multiple language bindings and IDL descriptions so programmers can plug their custom functionality into the framework and connect it with other components.-The model:XPCOM is one of the main...
  
   Mozilla applications cross Platform Component Object Model
• COM
  Component Object Model
  Component Object Model is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages...
  
   Microsoft Windows only cross language Object Model
• DCOM Distributed COM, extension making COM able to work in networks
• Common Language Infrastructure
  Common Language Infrastructure
  The Common Language Infrastructure is an open specification developed by Microsoft and standardized by ISO and ECMA that describes the executable code and runtime environment that form the core of the Microsoft .NET Framework and the free and open source implementations Mono and Portable.NET...
  
   current .Net cross language cross platform Object Model
• IBM System Object Model SOM, a component system from IBM used in OS/2
• Java Beans
• Java Remote Method Invocation
  Java remote method invocation
  The Java Remote Method Invocation Application Programming Interface , or Java RMI, is a Java application programming interface that performs the object-oriented equivalent of remote procedure calls ....
  
   (Java RMI)
• Internet Communications Engine
  Internet Communications Engine
  The Internet Communications Engine, or Ice, is an object-oriented middleware that provides object-oriented Remote Procedure Call, grid computing and Publish/subscribe functionality developed by ZeroC and dual-licensed under the GNU GPL and a proprietary license...
  
  
• Language binding
  Language binding
  In computing, a binding from a programming language to a library or OS service is an API providing that service in the language.Many software libraries are written in systems programming languages such as C or C++...
  
  
• Foreign function interface
  Foreign function interface
  A foreign function interface is a mechanism by which a program written in one programming language can call routines or make use of services written in another. The term comes from the specification for Common Lisp, which explicitly refers to the language features for inter-language calls as...
  
  
• Calling convention
  Calling convention
  In computer science, a calling convention is a scheme for how subroutines receive parameters from their caller and how they return a result; calling conventions can differ in:...
  
  
• Name mangling
  Name mangling
  In compiler construction, name mangling is a technique used to solve various problems caused by the need to resolve unique names for programming entities in many modern programming languages....
  
  
• Application programming interface
  Application programming interface
  An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
  
   - API
• Application Binary Interface
  Application binary interface
  In computer software, an application binary interface describes the low-level interface between an application program and the operating system or another application.- Description :...
  
   - ABI
• Comparison of application virtual machines
  Comparison of Application Virtual Machines
  This article lists some software virtual machines that are typically used for allowing application bytecode to be portably run on many different computer architectures and operating systems. The application is usually run on the computer using an interpreter or just-in-time compilation...
  
  
• SWIG
  SWIG
  SWIG is an open source software tool used to connect computer programs or libraries written in C or C++ with scripting languages such as Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, and other languages like C#, Java, Modula-3, Objective Caml, Octave, and Scheme...
  
  opensource automatic interfaces bindings generator from many languages to many languages