Openness
The openness of a computer system is the characteristic that determines whether the system can be extended and reimplemented in various ways. The openness of distributed systems is determined primarily by the degree to which new resource-sharing services can be added and be made available for use by a variety of client programs openness cannot be achieved unless the specification and documentation of the key software interfaces of the components of a system are made available to software developers. In a word, the key interfaces are published. This process is akin to the standardization of interfaces, but it often bypasses official standardization procedures, which are usually cumbersome and slow-moving.
However, the publication of interfaces is only the starting point for adding and extending services in a distributed system. The challenge to designers is to tackle the complexity of distributed systems consisting of many components engineered by different people.
The designers of the Internet protocols introduced a series of documents called ‘Requests For Comments’, or RFCs, each of which is known by a number. The specifications of the Internet communication protocols were published in this series in the early 1980s, followed by specifications for applications that run over them, such as file transfer, email and telnet by the mid-1980s. This practice has continued and forms the basis of the technical documentation of the Internet. This series includes discussions as well as the specifications of protocols. Copies can be obtained from [www.ietf.org].
Thus the publication of the original Internet communication protocols has enabled a variety of Internet systems and applications including the Web to be built. RFCs are not the only means of publication. For example, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops and publishes standards related to the working of the Web [www.w3.org].
Systems that are designed to support resource sharing in this way are termed open distributed systems to emphasize the fact that they are extensible. They may be extended at the hardware level by the addition of computers to the network and at the software level by the introduction of new services and the reimplementation of old ones, enabling application programs to share resources. A further benefit that is often cited for open systems is their independence from individual vendors.
To summarize:
• Open systems are characterized by the fact that their key interfaces are published.
• Open distributed systems are based on the provision of a uniform communication mechanism and published interfaces for access to shared resources.
• Open distributed systems can be constructed from heterogeneous hardware and software, possibly from different vendors. But the conformance of each component to the published standard must be carefully tested and verified if the system is to work correctly.
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