It's important to distinguish between ObjectMaps and BackingMaps. Though they are closely related, they perform very different duties in our application. A BackingMap is the map that stores persistent copies of our objects. All of our objects that have been committed in a transaction exist inside a BackingMap. This BackingMap may be in a local ObjectGrid instance, meaning that ObjectGrid is running inside the same memory space as our application, or in a distributed ObjectGrid. The distributed ObjectGrid is the one that is made up of at least one process dedicated to running ObjectGrid instances. Distributed ObjectGrid instances are typically made up of many processes utilizing the main memory of many different computers to create a unified logical data store.
We will never directly interact with a BackingMap to insert, update, or remove objects from it. We will only interact with a BackingMap to configure its behavior. This configuration is done either programmatically...