ABSTRACT
Recent advances in software and networking technologies have enabled developers to create increasingly complex and robust distributed applications. The technologies used in these applications must address issues specific to the distributed realm and largely absent in traditional, nondistributed component applications. In this chapter, we discuss the central issues encountered when designing component systems for distributed applications. In particular, we discuss the problems faced in locating and accessing remote components as well as communication protocols for and usage semantics of distributed components. We proceed to illustrate the concepts presented in this chapter by describing the design of an e-commerce application and examining the approach taken by the application designers to solve the issues specific to distributed components that arose during the development process.
