A type of computing in which different components and objects comprising an application can be located on different computers connected to a network. So, for example, a word processing application might consist of an editor component on one computer, a spell-checker object on a second computer, and a thesaurus on a third computer. In some distributed computing systems, each of the three computers could even be running a different operating system.
One of the requirements of distributed computing is a set of standards that specify how objects communicate with one another. There are currently two chief distributed computing standards: CORBA and DCOM.
