The present invention provides an elegant and simple way to provide mechanisms for invocation of objects by client applications and for argument passing between client applications and object implementations, without the client application or the operating system knowing the details of how these mechanisms work. Moreover, these mechanisms functions in a distributed computer environment with similar ease and efficiency, where client applications may be on one computer node and object implementations on another. The invention includes a new type of object, termed a "spring object," which includes a method table, a subcontract mechanism and a data structure which represents the subcontract's local private state.