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3.15.4. Distributed Services

In addition to transporting objects over a network, another common need in distributed application development is the management of object dissemination and connections between clients and servers.

PostModern Computing's Distributed Service paradigm is a connection and service management mechanism that is organized around the idea that network service providers should not have to set up explicit port numbers and RPC connections but rather should simply ``advertise'' themselves on the network. ``Agents'' are active processes on the network that monitor network service advertisements and manage connections between information producers and consumers. The Distributed Service package is organized as a combination of C++ class libraries and configurable ``dsagent'' executables. The Distributed Services paradigm is a powerful and flexible package that provides an object oriented framework for integrating and connecting applications on a network.

Distributed Services provides the following features: