A method and system for transferring objects between computers, especially a server and a device in a Java environment, is provided. A server connected to the device interrogates the device to determine whether the device has the available resources to accept a download, and to determine if any of objects included in the download are already resident on the device. Using a gateway object on the device, and a gateway managed-object on the server, the server passes an archive of the necessary objects, not presently available on the device, to the gateway via the gateway managed-object. The gateway then instructs a persistent storage repository on the device to commit the archive to persistent storage. A flag is set at the start of the archive-committing process, such that if the device loses power during the archive-committing process, upon re-initialization of the device, the device can determine that the archive-committing process failed and will instruct the persistent storage to free-up storage area used during the archive-committing process. The transferal of objects can then be recommenced once the server and device reestablish communication.