Distributed architectures

This section illustrates different patterns in building distributed architectures. These have been distilled considering the quirks described previously and arising out of the lessons learned over the years. Note that these are not mutually exclusive—rather, they can be thought of as templates for building various functionalities.

Object-based systems

The simplest (and earliest) distributed systems were composed of objects interacting with each other using Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) or Remote Method Invocations (RMIs):

The architecture consisted of three layers on each machine:

• The stub/skeleton layer: These were stubs or proxies for clients and skeletons for servers. A stub is a client...