Evolution of Distributed Computing

One of the most amazing things about being a professional developer is that change is a constant. Although change is always exciting and keeps the industry forever vibrant, this change comes at a cost—the maintenance of all the great technologies of the past that are now, well, technologies of the past. In short, developers today need to understand how to create all the latest, coolest innovations and integrate these innovations with a lot of legacy technologies. This means that there is always a need to maintain a variety of current and legacy systems. Just think of all the COBOL code written decades ago that is still a vital piece of many companies’ IT infrastructure. Relational databases are another good example of decades-old technology that is still amazingly relevant. The history of distributed computing is no different.

In a basic sense, we can trace the beginning of what can be called “distributed computing” to the advent of email. For the purposes of this book, we focus on the process of sending objects between applications that reside on distributed physical platforms. Distributed computing includes many technologies, including the following, which are covered at varied degrees within this chapter:

• HTML

• EDI

• RPC

• CORBA

• DCOM

• XML

• SOAP

• Web services

• ReST