Interoperability using APPC

The complex and competitive business world of today needs to access data for various operations from different systems placed at different geographical locations. In order to fulfil this need, one should have a reliable distributed computing environment. Various components of that environment may be supplied by different vendors. This means that the computing environment not only needs to be distributed but also requires interoperability. Today, Interoperability is no more just an idea but a reality. There is also a growing need to support interactions among various systems in a dialog mode. Integrating distributed systems can only help to achieve the goal of developing a reliable distributed computing environment. In this paper, a conceptual framework for an architecture is described in conjunction with Advanced Program-to-Program Communications LU 6.2 protocol to handle that challenge. This architecture discusses the required contracting services for integrating distributed systems. This contracting service has three major components: the contract interaction services, the contract support services, and the communications infrastructure services.