Distributed Objects Everywhere (DOE) was a long-running Sun Microsystems project to build a distributed computing environment based on the CORBA system in the 'back end' and OpenStep as the user interface. First started in 1990 and announced soon thereafter, it remained vaporware for many years before it was finally released as NEO in 1995. It was sold for only a short period before being dropped (along with OpenStep) in 1996. In its place is what is today known as Enterprise JavaBeans.
Background
In the early 1990s the 'next big thing' in computing was to use desktop microcomputers to display and edit data being provided by mainframes and minicomputers. Although a number of methods for this sort of access already existed, the division of labor was not at all even. For instance, SQL required the workstation to download huge data sets and then process them locally, whereas use of terminal emulators left all of the work to the server and provided no GUI.
It seemed that the proper split of duties would be to have a cooperative set of objects, the workstation being responsible for display and user interaction, with processing on the server. Standing in the way of this sort of solution was the massive differences in operating systems and programming languages between platforms. While it might be possible to build such a system that would work on any one combination of workstation and server, the same solution would not work on any other system.
In distributed computing, distributed objects are objects (in the sense of object-oriented programming) that are distributed across different address spaces, either in multiple computers connected via a network or even in different processes on the same computer, but which work together by sharing data and invoking methods. This often involves location transparency, where remote objects appear the same as local objects. The main method of distributed object communication is with remote method invocation, generally by message-passing: one object sends a message to another object in a remote machine or process to perform some task. The results are sent back to the calling object. Distributed objects were popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but have since fallen out of favor.
The term may also generally refer to one of the extensions of the basic object concept used in the context of distributed computing, such as replicated objects or live distributed objects.