Here's what we will cover in this course: We'll start by using an analogy to introduce the notion of distributed processing - we'll look at a fictitious company with growing pains and how they used technology to make their distributed office environment work. Then we'll take these notions and use Java RMI and CORBA to solve a similar programming problem, that is, how to access objects that reside on different computers.

While doing so, you will see actual coding samples that use RMI and CORBA. We will place special emphasis on the deployment of these coding samples, since it turns out that deployment is the often the hardest part of using these technologies.

But let's get started by looking at the Twisted Transistor company, which needs to grow while remaining efficient.