Distributed Computing Environment: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:47, 14 January 2007

Revision as of 05:05, 17 January 2007

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The DCE system was, to a large degree, based on independent developments made by each of the partners. [[DCE/RPC]] was derived from the ''Network Computing System'' (NCS) created at Apollo Computer. The naming service was derived from work done at Digital. DCE/DFS was based on the [[Andrew File System]] (AFS) originally developed at [[Carnegie Mellon University]]. The authentication system was based on [[Kerberos (protocol)|Kerberos]], and the authorization system based on [[Access Control List]]s (ACLs). By combining these features, DCE offers a fairly complete [[C (programming language)|C]]-based system for network computing. Any machine on the network can authenticate its users, gain access to resources, and then call them remotely using a single integrated [[Application Programming Interface|API]].

Distributed computing never really caught on as much as had been hoped for in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The rise of the [[Internet]], [[Java (programming language)|Java]] and [[web services]] stole much of its [[mindshare]] through the mid-to-late 1990s, and competing systems such as [[CORBA]] muddied the waters as well. Perhaps ironically, one of the major uses of DCE/RPC today are [[Microsoft]]'s [[Distributed_component_object_modelDistributed Component Object Model|DCOM]] and [[ODBC]] systems, which use DCE/RPC (in [[MSRPC]]) as their network transport layer.

OSF and its projects eventually became part of [[The Open Group]], which released DCE 1.2.2 under a [[free software license]] (the [[GNU Lesser General Public License|LGPL]]) on [[12 January]] [[2005]]. DCE 1.1 was available much earlier under the OSF BSD license, and resulted in [http://freedce.sf.net FreeDCE] being available since [[2000]]. FreeDCE contains an implementation of DCOM.