Part of Open Cobalt’s special sauce is an object-oriented semantics based on active object that have the capability of temporal reflection. Each object is aware of, and in direct control, of its behavior in time. Open Cobalt also directly supports replication of computation, allowing computation to be moved close to the point of interaction on demand, while maintaining a consistent view of behaviors that can scale to include thousands of nodes. It does this by using a combination of object semantics along with a modified version of David P. Reed’s TeaTime peer-based messaging protocol as a distributed message transactional system enabling replicated computation (synchronization) across multiple peers. This makes replicated computation as easily as replicating data – and makes synchronization of all events across multiple peers a fundamental property of the system.
Owing to these properties, software developers can use Open Cobalt as a way of creating deeply collaborative applications without the effort required to understand how replicated applications work. This reduces the programming overhead required for widespread deployment of deeply capable collaborative virtual spaces. It also makes it possible to deploy and coordinate the activities of virtual worlds on multiple machines without the requirement of maintaining central server resources (other than those needed for specialized data and institutional middleware services).