Steve has written a nice article on how you can coordinate threads in a distributed application, transparently, and with very little effort.

He does this simply by sharing an instance of a CyclicBarrier, a class in Doug Lea's excellent util.concurrent package(now included in JDK 5.0), across a cluster Using Distributed Shared Objects (DSO).

It really shows the power of DSO in action, by solving an extremely tricky problem in almost no time and no code.

Patrick Calahan has written an interesting article on Distributed Shared Objects (DSO) and how they compare to traditional ways of doing caching and clustering. DSO might just as well be the death of the the distributed hashmap, e.g. JCache etc. Seems to be the only sane way of doing clustering in Java.