Distributed Computing Environment: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:13, 26 June 2006

Revision as of 14:26, 18 July 2006

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As a side effect of the formation of OSF, the various members also contributed many of their ongoing research projects. At the time, network computing was "all the rage", and many of the companies involved were working on similar RPC-based systems. By re-building these various utilities on a single "official" RPC mechanism, OSF could offer a major advantage over SVR4, allowing any DCE-supporting system (namely OSF/1) to interoperate in a larger network.

The DCE system was, to a large degree, based on independantindependent 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 DEC. DCE/DFS was based on the [[Andrew file system]] (AFS) originally developed at [[Carnegie Mellon University]]. The authentication system was based on [[Kerberos]], and the authorization system based on [[Access Control List]]s (ACL's). 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 [[API]].

Distributed computing never really "caught on" as it had been hoped in the late-80s and early '90s. 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 is [[Microsoft]]'s [[DCOM]] and [[ODBC]] systems, which use DCE/RPC as their network transport layer.