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PDO is a shortcut for Portable Distributed Objects. In the near future PDO will become CORBA 2.0 compliant.
It is the industry's first product to provide a heterogeneous client/server framework on objects. With PDO it is possible to deploy objects on non-NEXTSTEP server machines and therefore deployed anywhere in a network, wherever they are most appropriate for a task.
PDO encapsulates low-level network protocols, making messaging a remote object as straightforward as messaging a local object. You even don't have to learn new programming tools or techniques, because PDO is a subset of NEXTSTEP tools and objects. Because PDO makes object location completely transparent to the application, the application communicates with every object the same way regardless wether it is local, in the local network or anywhere in the world.
Because of the free location of objects, objects may get moved to other locations, e.g. to optimize performance, without modification of the application using it.
Because PDO also runs on non-NEXTSTEP servers, it comes with it's own set of classes, libraries and even an Objective-C++ compiler, etc. Neverless you can build, maintain, etc. from any NEXTSTEP client connected to a PDO server. The tools used for building the final objects however are native to the server's OS.
PDO comes with Foundation Framework, Distributed Objects Framework, DOEventLoop and other core classes. Bundled tools are: Objective-C++ compiler, GDB, libg++, GNU make, Portable BuildServer, Portable nmserver, Mach Emulation, NEXTSTEP's default system, on-line documentation. Currently supported platforms are: HP-UX, SunOS, Solaris, Digital UNIX.