Jini™ Specifications, The, Second Edition

A.7. Lessons from NFS

We do not need to look far to see the consequences of ignoring the distinction between local and distributed computing at the interface level. NFS^®, Sun’s distributed computing file system^[14],[15] is an example of a non-distributed application programer interface (API) (open, read, write, close, etc.) re-implemented in a distributed way.

Before NFS and other network file systems, an error status returned from one of these calls indicated something rare: a full disk, or a catastrophe such as a disk crash. Most failures simply crashed the application along with the file system. Further, these errors generally reflected a situation that was either catastrophic for the program receiving the error or one that the user running ...