Abstract

It is generally recognized that developing distributed applications is very difficult. The simplest approach is to program each process using established centralized programming techniques and complement with coordinated message sending between processes using some communication service like TCP. There are many aspects that must be dealt with; synchronization between processes, getting the coordination in message sending right, preventing race conditions, avoiding deadlock, constructing outgoing messages, and parsing incoming messages. The sheer complexity of programming distributed applications on this level is overwhelming. To lessen the inherent complexity of distributed programming a number of distributed programming systems and/or middlewares have been developed over the years. Some target special kinds of networks, e.g. clusters on LANs. Others are more general and can be used on many different kinds of networks; LANs, WANs, the Internet and possibly wireless. In this paper we are concerned with systems of the second kind, systems that do not assume any special network topology or hardware. Some middlewares are geared...

Citations