OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Introduction and Style Guide

Chapter 1. Introduction to DCE Application
Programming
The majority of this first chapter consists of a fairly detailed overview of each of the
separate steps that a developer usually has to perform (or have the application perform)
from the beginning of coding to the end of execution of a successful DCE application.
Before you begin a serious study of the contents of any part of this guide, or indeed of
any other book in the DCE documentation set, you should read the Introduction to OSF
DCE. It contains clear and comprehensive overviews, with illustrations, of all the
DCE components and of the integrated DCE as a whole; many concepts and details
are explained there that are necessary to a full understanding of what is described
here.
If you do not find information about topics you are interested in either in this guide
or in the OSF DCE Application Development Reference, you should also look in the
OSF DCE Administration Guide and the OSF DCE Administration Reference.For
example, the DCE Cell Directory Service (CDS) is not accessed directly by applications
(except through DCE RPC NSI or through XDS) so most of the discussion of CDS as a
separate component is found in the administration documentation. Although the DCE
Security Service is documented in the development books, certain aspects of it important
to application developers (for example, adding new principals to the security registry
database) are found only in the administration books.
Several key methods underlie the successful development of DCE applications programs.
These methods, explained in this chapter, are as follows:
• A set of tools for distinguishing the component applications programs, for describing
how they work together, and for manipulating and managing DCE components both
locally and remotely.
• A method for establishing the interface between the component parts.
• Methods to install and register a server, so that clients can use it.
• Methods to set up clients so they can use servers.
124246 Tandem Computers Incorporated 1−1