Enhancing interoperability of DCE applications: a type management approach

Abstract

Presents an enhancement to the OSF DCE platform for distributed computing that is designed to enhance the interoperability of applications. Concepts from open distributed processing (ODP) have been taken, extended and applied to DCE, to improve the capacity for late binding, system evolution, resource discovery and software reusability. This paper analyzes approaches to application interoperability in a number of distributed computing platforms and based on the results, describes an enhancement for the DCE platform. The paper focuses on one component of this enhancement: a type manager that is able to canonically describe types of interacting objects and types of relationships between them.<>