What object oriented distributed programming does not have to be , and what it may be

CORBA, DCOM and RMI are acronyms that you have most probably heard about. You might have felt uncomfortable with the frustrating impression being the only one not to understand them in a meeting, or worst, you might have used them to impress your managers and look on the wave too. Those magic words have two common characteristics. First, they sound very in and sexy and are particularly appreciated in hot meetings about the future of the computing technologies. Writing a proposal for a DARPA or an Esprit project might have better chances of success if it has some of those acronyms in its introduction. Second, these acronyms are all the fruits of a big wedding; one of those weddings that are held every ten years or so. The wedding of two old but still exciting technologies: object oriented programming and distributed systems. The union of these technologies is a winning combination for the 90's; comparable to the combination of graphical interfaces and relational databases that was very successfully exploited in client-server architectures at the end of the 80’s.