What is DCE?
DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) is an architecture defined by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to provide an Open Systems platform to address the challenges of distributed computing.
It is being ported to all major IBM® and many non-IBM environments. Note that all current DCE implementations use TCP/IP rather than SNA as their communication protocol.
DCE is based on three distributed computing models:
- Client/server
- A way of organizing a distributed application
- Remote procedure call
- A way of communicating between parts of a distributed application
- Shared files
- A way of handling data in a distributed system, based on a personal computer file access model.
Note: CICS® alone (without DCE) also supports distributed computing.
See Distributed computing.
The rest of this section gives a high level view of the services provided by DCE.