Distributed Systems
Introduction
Out of the many possible definitions of a distributed system, we herein employ the following, which is perhaps the most general (and in particular supercedes Lamport's humorous remark that "a distributed system is the one that prevents you from working because of the failure of a machine that you had never heard of".)
- Distributed System
A distributed system is comprised by a number of components (hardware and/or software) of a similar type working together to provide one service.
This definition implies
Concurrency
Trust
Fault Tolerance
Distributed systems allow parts of the system to be located on separate computers and different locations. So business logic and data can be reached from any remote computer (location).
Distributed objects are the most recent development in distributed computing. Distributed object technologies such as Java RMI, CORBA, and DCOM allow objects running on one machine to be used by applications on different computers.