LAN/WAN integration: internetworking+application interoperability

Users interconnect their LANs and WANs to support their applications. This distributed environment requires more than communications standards. This paper addresses the services required to support distributed processing and the various activities to develop the "standards" to provide these services. It discusses the ISO's approach to open distributed processing (ODP), and describes the ODP reference model and the seven aspects of a distributed system. The Open Software Foundation's distributed computing environment, middleware, the evolution in the marketplace of the PC LAN/WAN environment and the enterprise network goal architecture are also described.<>