RPC, COM, DCOM, COM+: What's the Difference?

Anyone new to the world of distributed technology might find it difficult to navigate through the abbreviations. They generate a lot of confusion but in general are all about the same. I start with the definition of terms used throughout this chapter and a historic overview of COM technology.

Evolution of COM

In the late 1970s the RPC concept was introduced by the Open Software Foundation (OSF), a consortium of companies formed to develop the specifications for the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) framework. As a part of the DCE framework, RPC was a revolutionary language-independent technique allowing processes on different machines to communicate with each other in a simple, flexible, and ...

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