Distributed Objects Everywhere: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:39, 30 December 2004

Revision as of 16:05, 3 January 2005

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Extending these systems to support [[remote procedure call]]s behind the scenes was seen as a natural extension, and solution to the client/server programming problem. At the time there were a number of major projects to delver such a system, including [[IBM]]'s [[System Object Model]] (SOM/DSOM), [[NeXT]]'s [[Portable Distributed Objects]], [[Microsoft]]'s [[Component Object Model]] (COM/DCOM) and many CORBA flavors. Sun, attempting to position itself as the future IBM in terms of backoffice support, felt they had to attack this market as well.

Sun's solution was based on work in their [[Sun Spring|Spring]] experimental operating system]], which used intercommunicating objects for almost all programming tasks. Modifying this to work under a "traditional" Unix like Solaris was not all that difficult, although Unix makes the assumption that all programs run locally, and an interface for remote access had to be added.

During the early DOE efforts, CORBA became a key [[buzzword]], prompting a delay while the system was re-engineered for CORBA support. Under the CORBA model different objects, like those from DOE or SOM, would be able to interact by sharing a common interface.