The OSF DCE Application Development Guide - Introduction and Style Guide (hereafter, the Style Guide) attempts to bridge a gap. On one side stands the tutorial and reference material provided by the rest of the OSF DCE Application Development Guide and by the OSF DCE Application Development Reference. In theory, this material provides complete documentation of the mechanisms of DCE application programming. In particular, it documents the syntax and semantics of every DCE API interface and IDL construct and provides a service-by-service guide to their use.
On the other side stands the formal application portability specification provided by the Application Environment Specification/Distributed Computing. This provides a policy guide of a specific kind: if applications wish to be portable among DCE implementations, they need to follow the AES guidelines.
Between these two poles of DCE documentation, there is still a great deal of room to maneuver. The DCE application programming facilities provide such a large number of mechanisms, so many possible ways of doing things, that it is often difficult for the programmer to decide among them. The guidelines provided by the AES/DC are limited to only one (albeit an important one) policy issue: portability. The DCE programmer is still left with many decisions about issues that do not arise in the typical local programming environment: how to use the name services, which security services to employ, how many threads to use, and so on.
The Style Guide attempts to answer many of these questions or at least to provide the grounds upon which an application programmer can base decisions. Of course, the coverage in these relatively few pages in not exhaustive. The number of implementation issues raised by the available DCE application programming mechanisms is potentially unlimited. The Style Guide attempts to cover the major issues that are likely to confront most programmers at some stage in DCE application design and development.
Aside from attempting to anticipate your questions, the Style Guide may also raise issues that you may not even have considered. DCE covers a great deal of ground that is probably unfamiliar to most application developers, such as multithreading and distributed security. When moving in such unfamiliar territory, it is easy to overlook potential problems. The Style Guide attempts to alert you to major stumbling blocks in each area.
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