Application development, software engineering and distributed processing

Abstract

Some concepts and issues that relate to the development of distributed applications are discussed. A distributed application is considered to be an application developed with the explicit purpose of running on more than a single computing system, with the characteristic that there is interactive interdependency between application modules on different nodes. Consideration of the issues involved in the development of such applications necessarily involves topics in the state-of-the-art of application development, the meaning of phrases like ‘local remote transparency’, the nature of systems mechanisms needed to support distributed applications, and other systems and programming aspects. The paper attempts to establish an image of what mature distributed processing application development will look like; what mature distributed processing systems will look like; and what kinds of design considerations apply to the underlying concepts like the remote procedure call.