Interoperability FRANK MANOLA GTE Laboratories lssuesin L.arge-Scale Distributed Object Systems Incorporatecl, Waltham, Massachusetts, (fmo2@ gte.tom) Issues of interoperability are receiving increasing attention as organizations move from mainframe-based islands of automation toward open, distributed computing environments, and as national efforts toward an information superhighway receive increasing attention. The demand for interoperability is driven by the accelerated construction of large-scale distributed systems for operational use. The Internet (particularly its commercial and research applications) is one such system, and much has been and is being written about it. However, in this paper we focus on enterprise-wide client/server systems being developed to support operational computing within large organizations to illustrate interoperability issues (Figure 1). Requirements for these systems are not speculative; numerous large businesses are building systems of this type today. The architecture is distributed, and divided into three logical layers: applications, shared services, and data. The layers are only logical groupings; all components communicate via a common object-oriented messaging backplane. This reflects the increasing agreement that modeling a system as a distributed collection of objects provides the appropriate framework for integrating resources in these environments, and is illustrated by the number of standards activities that are moving toward adopting,
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