About Joe Stein
There are a number of factors to take into account while developing distributed software systems. If you don’t even know what I am talking about in the first sentence then let me give you some insight, examples and for instances of what distributed systems are.
Overview
A distributed system is when multiple physical hardware devices interact with separate and discrete users and collaborate together through these hardware devices to accomplishes different and also similar goals for these discrete and seperate users. Sometimes these devices work in a pier-to-pier mode using servers as hubs for knowledge of connectivity to each other while others collaborate and coordinate through a single or set of centralized servers e.g.
An extranet like system where supply side users are reviewing documents through a web browser and click through a workflow in their browsers that ultimatly fax documents to another set of users that provide services that are sufficiently labeled… i.e. with a bar code. This loop makes for a closed system to design and develop distributed software for. The recipient of the faxes fill out and do whatever they need as part of their paper based world (including receiving many faxes over time and sending them all back in at once, which is another set of cases for another blog post on e-signing). The receiving fax servers on receipt of the inbound original documents “hands” the faxed images received over for collation and processing for yet another set of users (or even the same ones that originated the outbound fax) to review and work with them under an intake workflow again in their browser.
Source : http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/06/distributed-system-development-considerations.html
