COMPARISON OF OBJECT-ORIENTED AND TRADITIONAL SYSTEMS-DEVELOPMENT ISSUES IN DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS

The client/server model for application development is becoming popula r with Australian organisations. While the literature suggests that is sues such as task partitioning and task allocation are important in di stributed application design, no prior research has been reported on t he relative importance of these issues and the adequacy with which cur rent traditional and object-oriented methodologies support distributed application design. The reported research involved a multiple case st udy of Australian organisations undertaking client/server development. While the same issues appear to be important for both OO and non-GO c lient/server development, the developers of the OO projects placed gre ater emphasis on task partitioning, intermodule communications, interp rocess communications, and application topology. Current methodologies were found to provide little or no support for these important issues in client/server development. In fact there was no significant differ ence in the support offered by all methodologies.