DCE Messaging Project High Level Goal

DCE Messaging Team
Open Software Foundation
June 17, 1996

Target Audience

This document is meant for marketing and sales people who are interested in really high level description of the project.

DCE offers a rich environment of integrated services for distributed computing based upon RPC. Some distributed applications, however, are more naturally implemented via an asynchronous, messaging paradigm.

The goal of this project is to integrate messaging into the DCE infrastructure creating a common, coherent environment for both RPC and message oriented distributed computational models. The uniformed environment will provide a common base for application developers, as well as to ease the administration tasks for administrators.

DCE Messaging will use the DCE naming model, which provides a distributed naming environment where logical names are used in place of physical names to provide applications with a location transparent support. With DCE naming support, DCE messaging can provide location independent message passing and queuing functionality.

DCE security will be used. Authenticated messaging with authorization support will make it possible for secured messaging operations.

The outcome of the project will consist of four parts:

a set of APIs that allows an application to submit an arbitrarily complex typed message to be sent to a destination securely, with naming support.
an infrastructure for a message queuing system (MQS) where messages are stored and possibly forwarded among queue managers.
a set of administration commands, in the dcecp terms, which users and administrators can use to operate on queues and messages.
a proof-of-concept implementation of a distributed application using the DCE messaging prototype.

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