Systems lab's Plan B (1st ed.)

Plan B is an operating system designed to work in distributed environments where the set of available resources is different at different points in time.

It's main design guidelines are:

• All resources are perceived as a single abstraction, the box. Boxes are data containers that are operated using copy instead of the traditional read/write. They have type and constraints which determine how they can be used together.
• The system operates on both local and remote boxes through the same protocol. Any implementor of such protocol can be used as part of a Plan B system.
• Each application has its own name space and can customize it. Customization is done by defining names for boxes, as well as the order in which names should be searched.
• Boxes are used by name and no descriptors are kept. Applications keep no connections to resources, they use the network to send self-contained requests.
• Boxes can be advertised as they become available to be automatically bound to pre-specified names in the name spaces of applications that care about such resources.

The 1st edition user's manual can give you a glimpse of how to write code for a Plan B application. Source code is available under the Plan B license. If you accept the license, enter your email and click on "Accept" to download the source.