DCE - The OSF Distributed Computing Environment. Introduction and foundations
The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was founded in 1988 with the order to develop an open computing environment. In 1992 Release V1.0 of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) was shipped with implementations for the operating systems OSF/1, AIX and System V Release 4 (SVR4). It is intended and perhaps meanwhile done to make available DCE for a lot of other operating systems like VMS, SINIX, OS/400, OS/2, HP-UX and MS-DOS. DCE has been developed to support the construction of distributed applications. It contains tools for Name Services, Security Services and Time Services as well as a Distributed File System (DFS). The 249 pages of the book are divided in 9 chapters, a reference list, an index and a glossary. The text is supported by 111 figures. The first chapter gives an overview of characteristics, advantages and problems connected with distributed applications. Central to the book is a discussion of architectural concepts of OSF DCE. In the next chapters DCE components are presented. The reader will find detailed discussions of Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), Threads, Distributed Name Services, Security Services, Distributed Time Services and Distributed File System Services. The last chapter presents an evaluation of DCE and gives hints for further developments of this system. The book contains lots of technical details. Readers should have knowledge in operating systems concepts, network protocols and in the usage of the \(C\) computer language. Otherwise they hardly will profit for example from the discussion of Remote Procedure Calls, which are one of the central themes of this book. The C examples are instructive and show in a practical manner parts of the programming interface to DCE. But they are not intended for beginners in computer science. Nevertheless the author uses a clear and understandable language. The book is carefully edited and I could not find any misprints. I can recommend this book for system engineers and system programmers in the area of developing distributed applications. Partially the book can be useful for students of computer science in graduate courses.
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