Live distributed object

[7] Originally, the term was used to refer to the types of dynamic, interactive Web content that is not hosted on servers in data centers, but rather stored on the end-user's client computers, and internally powered by instances of reliable multicast protocols.

The word distributed expressed the fact that the information is not hosted, stored at a server in a data center, but rather, it is replicated among the end-user computers, and updated in a peer-to-peer fashion through a stream of multicast messages that may be produced directly by the end-users consuming the content; a more comprehensive discussion of the live object concept in the context of Web development can be found in Krzysztof Ostrowski's Ph.D.

The platform provided a set of visual, drag and drop tools for composing hierarchical documents resembling web pages, and containing XML-serialized live object references.

Visual content such as chat windows, shared desktops, and various sorts of mashups could be composed by dragging and dropping components representing user interfaces and protocol instances onto a design form, and connecting them together.

Since the moment of its creation, a number of extension have been developed to embed live distributed objects in Microsoft Office documents,[10] and to support various types of hosted content such as Google Maps.