Bernard C. Cole.
The Emergence of Net-Centric Computing: network computers. internet appliances, and connected PCs.
Prentice Hall. 1999
• Covers every variety of network computing device
• Clients, servers, and back-end infrastructure
• Networked multimedia: the future of the Internet
The traditional PC is history: Net-centric computing is the future. But what form will it take? Computing appliances, “connected PCs,” Web-enabled set-top boxes, Webphones, Internet-connected wireless communicators, or Java™-based network computers? All of them—or something else entirely? What challenges face professionals who want to build, plan for, or invest in these new systems? Now, award-winning editor Bernard Cole—who covers net-centric computing for Electronic Engineering Times—provides an up-to-the-minute birds-eye view of the entire field. He presents every leading approach and reviews all these crucial technology issues:
• Making the Internet scale to support net-centric computing
• Pros, cons, and alternatives to Java in networked computing devices
• The role of distributed objects, including CORBA and COM
• Net-centric operating systems:
OS-9000, DAVID, pSOS+, VxWorks, VRTX, PowerTV, Java OS, and Windows CE 2.0
• RISC and CISC processors: x86, ARM, picoJava, Shaboom, and other alternatives
• Supercharging I/O: RSVP, parallelism, I20, and other key strategies
Cole offers new insight into the make-or-break challenges facing the net-centric computing industry, including security, testing, maintenance, and reliability. He reviews the massive infrastructure and technology enhancements needed to support real-time networked multimedia, including MPEG4, RTSP, VRML, Java3D, MMX and its competitors, and 64-bit processors. Finally, he previews tomorrow’s new Web-centric user interfaces, intended to keep users from getting “lost in the Web.” With extraordinary breadth and depth, Cole has done what others thought impossible: He has made sense of the net-centric computing future.