A Framework for Evaluating Distributed Object Models and its Application to Web Engineering

The success of building distributed object systems depends on important factors such as architecture, the distributed object model (DOM) selected, and the process adapted in the selection of the DOM. There are a number of DOMs. Although the primary goals of these models are the same, each model has a unique underlying architecture, maturity, and features provided. A critical evaluation of DOMs is thus needed by those organizations that are considering migrating to distributed object computing. The evaluation process can be time-consuming and may drain organizational resources. Most of the current evaluation processes adopted by organizations are not generic enough, and they concentrate only on the problem on hand. Hence, they cannot be used by any other organization, sometimes not even a different project at the same organization. Therefore, a more generalized framework or template is required to evaluate DOMs. This paper proposes a framework to evaluate DOMs. A number of important managerial items such as cost, personnel, and technology resources, training, enterprise changes, and time constraints have been identified, explained, and justified as the evaluation criteria. An evaluation of the most widely used DOMs, CORBA, DCOM, and RMI, is provided using the above criteria. Finally, a case study of a production web-based system is presented to demonstrate the use of the framework.