Described are methods of providing data sharing between applications. The applications run on different computers, communicate via a network, and share a same distributed object. Each application maintains on its computer an invariant copy of the distributed object and a variant copy of the distributed object. Each application performs update operations to the distributed object, where such an update operation issued by a given one of the applications is performed by: executing the update operation on the variant copy maintained by the given application (i) without the given application waiting for the other applications to perform the operation (each invariant copy is guaranteed to converge to a same state) and (ii) at each of the applications, including the given application, executing the update operation on the corresponding invariant copies.