Building Distributed Systems on the Pragmatic Object Web", Wiley '99 book in progress

We review the growing power and capability of commod-ity computing and communication technologies largely driven by commercial distributed information systems. These systems are built from CORBA, Microsoft's COM, JavaBeans, and rapidly advancing Web ap-proaches. One can abstract these to a three-tier model with largely independent clients connected to a dis-tributed network of servers. The latter host various services including object and relational databases and of course parallel and sequential computing. High per-formance can be obtained by combining concurrency at the middle server tier with optimized parallel back end services. The resultant system combines the needed per-formance for large-scale HPCC applications with th