Managing Distributed Objects and Services

To overcome the discovered shortcomings in a procedure-based programming language, object-oriented design (OOD) and object-oriented programming (OOP) emerged in the late 1980s and then became popular in 1990s. OOD/OOP has been widely applied in practice since the early years of 21st century. In this chapter, the need for distributed objects and messaging in enterprise applications is first discussed. As more and more distributed applications have been developed using OOP languages, integration practitioners have to understand how distributed objects and messaging based applications can be efficiently and cost-effectively designed and managed to meet the needs of enterprise integration in the long run. Moreover, there are many different programming languages that can be used to program object-oriented applications. Managing distributed objects in a heterogeneous computing setting is then fully explored. Finally, the middleware technology in support of effective management of distributed objects and services is articulated. Examples of leveraging middleware to manage distributed applications are provided.