| Remoting offers developers many ways to customize the communications process, for efficiency, security, performance and power, and allows seamless integration of components running on several computers into a single application. This book exposes the full power of remoting to developers working in mixed platform environments in a way that will ensure they have a deep understanding of what remoting is capable of, and how they can make it work the way they want.
Many of today’s enterprise computing systems are powered by distributed object middleware. Such systems, which are common in industries such as telecommunications, finance, manufacturing, and government, often support applications that are critical to particular business operations. Because of this, distributed object middleware is often held to stringent performance, reliability, and availability requirements. Fortunately modern approaches have no problem meeting or exceeding these requirements. Today, successful distributed object systems are essentially taken for granted.
There was a time, however, when making such claims about the possibilities of distributed objects would have met with disbelief and derision. In their early days, distributed object approaches were often viewed as mere academic fluff with no practical utility. Fortunately, the creators of visionary distributed objects systems such as Eden, Argus, Emerald, COMANDOS, and others were undeterred by such opinion. Despite the fact that the experimental distributed object systems of the 1980s were generally impractical – too big, too slow, or based on features available only from particular specialized platforms or programming languages – the exploration and experimentation required to put them together collectively paved the way for the practical distributed objects systems that followed. |
