JavaSpaces™ Principles, Patterns, and Practice

1.2. Challenges of Distributed Computing

Despite their benefits, distributed applications can be notoriously difficult to design, build, and debug. The distributed environment introduces many complexities that aren't concerns when writing standalone applications. Perhaps the most obvious complexity is the variety of machine architectures and software platforms over which a distributed application must commonly execute. In the past, this heterogeneity problem has thwarted the development and proliferation of distributed applications: developing an application entailed porting it to every platform it would run on, as well as managing the distribution of platform-specific code to each machine. More recently, the Java virtual machine has eased this ...