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As recently as ten years ago, distributed computing generally meant you had client PCs in one room with a server in another room. The problem with this architecture is if the connection to the server is lost, clients cannot update the payroll, sales, or other distributed company databases. To prevent this sort of down time, different networking models were created. One example is the master and slave server model where if the master fails, the slaves take over. The problem with the different networking models is they all required some form of manual intervention and were tied to one operating system or language. And while these approaches met some of the short-term requirements for decreasing down time, they did not apply to heterogeneous distributed systems consisting of mixed network protocols and machines. The Java platform combined with other advances such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), multi-tiered servers, and wireless networks has brought the realization of fully distributed computing a step further from the traditional client and server approach. Now you can build applications that include service redundancy by default. If one server connection fails, you can seamlessly use a service on another server. CORBA and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) bridges mean that objects can be transferred between virtually all machines and languages. And with the new Jini System software, the distributed computing environment can soon be part of everything in your home, office or school. In short, distributed computing has never before been as important as it is today.
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