Fundamental Principles of Distributed Systems

Abstract

Many of the fundamental principles of distributed systems play an important role in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Therefore, this chapter briefly introduces these principles as they are relevant to an understanding of the distributed character of CSCW.

We discuss the key concept of transparency as well as typical mechanisms of communication such as information sharing, message exchange, bidirectional communication, producer-consumer interaction, and the well-known client-server model. As part of the discussion of the client-server model, we introduce the remote procedure call (RPC) as a means for processing service requests. We describe, in detail, RPC properties, the structure of RPC messages, and the fundamental mechanisms of RPC languages.

Furthermore, we introduce object-oriented systems and show how objects of such systems can be distributed among the different participating sites. Here, we briefly mention the concepts of the famous tuple space model as well as that of so-called Linear Objects. As part of the description of distributed applications, we focus on group communication and the design of distributed applications built along the ODP framework.

Finally, we present a survey-like introduction to the problem of resource allocation and resource assignment, respectively, in distributed systems.