Is DCE a Support Environment for ODP
Ashley Beitz, Paul King, Kerry Raymond · 1993
Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) is a distributed environment for the development and execution of distributed applications. This paper assesses DCE's suitability as a support environment for open distributed processing by evaluating it against the general requirements and specific architecture defined by the ISO/CCITT Basic Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). The results indicate that DCE is not conformant with RM-ODP, and thus cannot be considered as a support environment for ODP. However, DCE delivers proven technologies for many aspects of distributed processing. 1 Introduction Distributed applications consist of discrete components which are spread across multiple systems. The interaction undertaken between these components is known as distributed processing. If the discrete components are capable of exhibiting "openness" --- the combination of the characteristics: scalable, accessible, heterogeneous, autonomous and decentralised [Tsh89] --- then the...