Note: Many topics at this site are reduced versions of the text in "The Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications." Search results will not be as extensive as a search of the book's CD-ROM.

Distributed applications allow users to interact with other systems on a network. A distributed application is traditionally divided into two parts-the front-end client and the back-end server. This is the client/server model, a model that balances processing loads between client and server. See "Client/Server Computing." Distributed means that clients may interact with many different servers all over the network.

Application/groupware suites like Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Notes/Domino, and Netscape SuiteSpot are designed for distributed networks. Management applications that use SNMP can collect information from remote distributed systems and report it back to management systems.

The Internet and the Web are "massively distributed networks." Web browsers provide a universal client for accessing applications and resources on local and remote systems, either within the organization or outside. The object/component approach breaks up complex programs into smaller components that make it easier to distribute and update applications, especially on the Internet.

Dan Nessett of 3Com points out some important and emerging concepts for object technologies in his excellent paper "Massively Distributed Systems" (see the link on the related entries page). He points out two ways of organizing computations on distributed systems:

• Move data to the processing, as is done with NFS (Network File System), World Wide Web, FTP, and Gopher.


• Move processing to the data, as is done with active networking and Java applets (i.e., objects move within the distributed system, and carry both code and data).

Nessett notes that "If the object consists primarily of data, it will closely approximate moving data to the processing. If it consists primarily of code, it will closely approximate moving pro- cessing to the data."

The three-tier model consists of clients on one end and servers on the other, and a middle tier that provides services, business rules, transaction management, and other business logic. The server side may consist of database servers, data marts, and data warehouses. See "Distributed Computer Networks," "Multitiered Architectures" "Distributed Object Computing," and "Object Technologies."

The middleware component is now commonly referred to as an application server. Application servers interface with databases and information systems on the back end and clients, usually Web server clients, on the front end. The servers may perform relatively simple functions, such as building Web pages on-the-fly with data obtained from back-end servers. The servers may also provide more sophisticated functions, such as transaction processing in electronic commerce applications.

Application servers provide a variety of functions. They serve as a central hub for application services, including message routing, object exchange, transaction processing, data transformation, and so on. They also may support CORBA, Microsoft COM/DCOM, and Enterprise JavaBeans. Additional features include the ability to connect with a variety of back-end database services and to load balance the traffic between users and a cluster of servers.