What is Distributed Computing and DCE?
 
The OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) is an industry-standard, vendor-neutral set of distributed computing technologies. DCE is deployed in critical business environments by a large number of enterprises worldwide. It is a mature product with three major releases, and is the only middleware system with a comprehensive security model.

DCE provides a complete Distributed Computing Environment infrastructure. It provides security services to protect and control access to data, name services that make it easy to find distributed resources, and a highly scalable model for organizing widely scattered users, services, and data. DCE runs on all major computing platforms and is designed to support distributed applications in heterogeneous hardware and software environments. DCE is a key technology in three of today's most important areas of computing: security, the World Wide Web, and distributed objects.
DCE is the Distributed Computing Environment, from the Open Software
Foundation. (It is called "the DCE" by sticklers for grammatical
consistency.)
 
DCE consists of multiple components which have been integrated to work
closely together. They are the Remote Procedure Call (RPC), the Cell
and Global Directory Services (CDS and GDS), the Security Service, DCE
Threads, Distributed Time Service (DTS),and Distributed File Service
(DFS). The Threads, RPC, CDS, Security, and DTS components are
commonly referred to as the "secure core" and are the required
components of any DCE installation. DFS is an optional component.

DCE is called "middleware" or "enabling technology." It is not
intended to exist alone, but instead should be integrated or bundled
into a vendor's operating system offering. DCE's security and
distributed filesystem, for example, can completely replace their


current, non-network, analogs.