The goal of this course is to provide a broad but solid overview of distributed object programming using middleware, which is a discipline of designing, implementing, and maintaining software systems that are composed from programming objects that do not share the same state. In addition, partial failures make it difficult for programmers to reason about the behavior of distributed objects. Since software that uses distributed objects has become ubiquitous in today's world, it affects all aspects of our lives. However, building this software requires significant resources and knowledge, and often ends as a failure.

In this course we review different areas of distributed object programming with the concentration on practical aspects of using middleware to support various properties of distributed objects. Lectures will be based on the material from the textbook (Wolfgang Emmerich, Engineering Distributed Objects, John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, August 2005.), standards (RMI, EJB, CORBA CCM, DCOM) and on research papers written by accomplished software engineers and computer scientists. Students will be introduced to various topics of distributed object programming, and different domains to which methods and tools learned with each topic are applicable.