Simplifying Distributed System Development

TIB/Rendezvous eases distributed system development in these ways:

1. Decoupling and data independence :Distributed systems can be difficult to develop, maintain, and port to other environments. One reason for this difficulty is that components running on networked hosts are often tightly coupled - components must agree on network connections, the low-level format for data transfer, and other details. TIB/Rendezvous allows looser coupling between the components of a distributed system. Loose coupling decreases costs for development, operation and maintenance, and increases system longevity. TIB/Rendezvous self-describing data messages promote data independence; producers and consumers of data can communicate even if they do not share the same internal representations for data. Communicating programs can run on different hardware architectures, even though they use different bit order, byte alignment, or numeric representations. Data independence also eases program evolution. Producers can gracefully add new content fields to their messages without invalidating legacy receivers.
2. Location transparency:TIB/Rendezvous uses subject-based addressing™ technology to direct messages to their destinations, so program processes can communicate without knowing the details of network addresses or connections. Subject-based addressing conventions define a uniform name space for messages and their destinations.
   The locations of component processes become entirely transparent; any application component can run on any network host without modification, recompilation or reconfiguration. Application programs migrate easily among host computers.
3. Architectural emphasis on information sources and destinations:Decoupling distributed components eliminates much of the complexity traditionally associated with distributed programming. TIB/Rendezvous lets you think about distributed system architecture in new ways. You can divide the system into modules along natural boundaries implied by the application's information content. The first step in developing a distributed system is to identify sources and destinations of information. Nextly analyzing a distributed application problem in terms of information flow very often suggests the most natural, efficient, and flexible solution.
4. Reliable delivery of whole messages:TIB/Rendezvous provides reliable communications between programs, while hiding the burdensome details of network communication and packet transfer from the programmer. TIB/Rendezvous takes care of segmenting and recombining large messages, acknowledging packet receipt, retransmitting lost packets, and arranging packets in the correct order. Multicast messages can often be lost when some of the intended recipients experience transient network failures. TIB/Rendezvous uses proprietary reliable multicast protocols to deliver messages despite brief network glitches.