Working with the Web and Distributed Systems

Although the Microcosm system was originally designed as a peer-to-peer distributed architecture, the commercial version of the product has not yet implemented the original design in this respect. The original problem was that PC-based systems in the late 1980s did not implement support for communication with processes running on other PCs. Consequently the commercial version only implements distribution in the sense that the data resources may be distributed. Initially this was possible using network file systems, and later versions have implemented distribution over a wide area network using URLs and standard TCP/IP network protocols such as http and ftp. However, research has continued in the production of distributed Microcosm, and inevitably, due to the popularity of the World Wide Web, much of this research has been centred on using the WEB infrastructure. This chapter describes some of this research and the system prototypes that have resulted.