Distributed Object Systems Notes

Master

Description

Many software systems are modelled and built as a collection of cooperating objects that call each other's methods. Now applications are becoming more and more distributed, e.g. on the Internet. Traditionally distributed application are built by these applications making connections and sending messages to each other according to a certain protocol. However, in a distributed object-oriented system we connect these two paradigms, and design and build the distributed application as a collection of objects that are scattered through a network and can call methods of remote objects. Standard systems have been developed to ease this process.

The trend is now to go to more self-contained and self-describing objects which are also called components.

In this course we will study a number of these systems and compare them. We will also build an application with distributed objects in small project groups.

Topics

The following items roughly correspond to material for a lecture (or two).

Introduction -- development of distributed paradigms
Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
Components -- Javabeans
Corba
COM, DCOM, Active-X, OLE
Open document structures
Newer developments, like SOAP and .NET
Other distributed tecnhiques like Linda

Concepts

The following concepts play an important role in this course. They are discussed as part of the main topics.

Distribution of objects
Component-oriented software development
Naming in a distributed environment
Marshalling
Proxies and agents
Binary and symbolic communication standards
Interoperability between programming languages and operating systems
Security in distributed systems

Material

Articles to be downloaded from the WWW

Dependencies

Requires
- Object Oriented Modelling and Programming
- Computers, Software and Networks and/or
- Distributed programming

Lecturer

Main.Piet van Oostrum

History

This course has evolved from

Gedistribueerde Objectsystemen (1999, 2000, 2001)

Discussion

MasterCourses