| ACRONYM | TERM | DESCRIPTION |
| ORB | Object Request Broker | A software router, or object bus that allows software objects to communicate with each other, both locally and remotely. |
| CORBA | Common Object Request Broker Architecture | The Open Distributed Object standard sponsored by the Object Management Group, a consortium of over 700 companies in the software industry. |
| IDL | Interface Definition Language | CORBA's neutral language that allows component providers to specify the interface and structure of the objects they provide. The grammar is a subset of C++ with additional keywords to support distributed concepts. |
| IIOP | Internet Inter-ORB Protocol | The backbone protocol for CORBA, added as part of the 2.0 spec. TCP/IP with added CORBA-defined message exchanges. An ORB must either implement IIOP or provide a half-bridge to it to be 2.0 compliant. |
| SII | Static Invocation Interface | A CORBA interface that provides early binding of parameters, allowing the IDL compiler to check data-type correctness at compile time. |
| BOA | Basic Object Adapter | The primary interface that a CORBA 2.0 implementation uses to access ORB functions. |
| DCOM | Distributed COM | Microsoft's implementation of a distributed component architecture, built on COM. |
| COM | Component Object Model | Microsoft's specification describing the process of communicating through interfaces, acquiring access to interfaces through the QueryInterface method, determining pointer lifetime through reference counting, and re-using objects through aggregation. |
| OLE | Object Linking and Embedding | Microsoft's method for integrating the output from one program as data in another (for example, incorporating a drawing into a word-processing document). |
| OCX | OLE Control eXtension | Intended to replace Visual Basic Controls, these visual drag-and-drop components eventually evolved into ActiveX controls. |
| ActiveX | A leaner OLE for building binary software components that exist as either DLLs or executable files that can be run locally or across a network. | |
NDS |
Netware Distribution Services | Novell's way of providing a single, global, logical view of all network services and resources. |
| LDAP | Lightweight Directory Access Protocol | An open standard protocol for directory services. A subset of X.500, but can also be used with standalone and other kinds of directory servers. Recently positioned as an open standard for directory services on the Internet-a standard way for Internet client applications and Web servers to access online directories of people and information such as user names, email addresses, and telephone numbers. |
| X.500 | A standard defining the protocols and information model for a global directory service independent of computing application and network platform. Based on a hierarchically distributed directory of named information that users can browse and search. A set of directory servers each holds a portion of the global directory information base. The servers coop erate to provide a directory service to user applications in a way similar to DNS-the user applications can connect to any directory server and issue queries to access information anywhere in the global directory. Basing a directory service on X.500 means access to data is secure and can be distributed or centralized. | |
| RMI | Remote Method Invocation | Sun's Java-based architecture for providing distributed computing. |