Building Distributed Systems Everyone is building a distributed systems thesedays,but the “how” has becomea matter for religious de- bate and the “why” is often neglectedcompletely. This panel brings together a variety of practitioners to explain the joys and woes of building a distributed systemincluding: . why a distributed solution was chosen . what middleware was selected and why . what issuesand gotchasrearedtheir ugly headsand what was done about it Moderator: Doug Lea, University of Oswego Panelists: . David Forslund, Los Alamos National Laboratory . Tom Barry, Lucent l Don Vines, Genesis . RajendraRaj, Morgan Stanley . Ashutosh Tiwary, Boeing Information and support services Position Statements: David Forslund, Los Alamos National Laboratory Providing secureelectronic medical recordsover the internet is a continuing challenge to the healthcareenterprise. We discussour experiences with the deployment of a secure, JavaiCORBA-based multimedia electronic record systemin a rural healthcaresetting. In particular, issuesof scalability, portability, extensibility, interoperability, useability, and quality of service will be discussed in detail. Tom Barry, Lucent Lucent beganbuilding its custom AssistanceRequest systemabout two and a half years ago. Smalltalk was chosenfor the client and a relational database was chosenas the backend. Not long after the project was began,Gemstone/Sreplacedthe relation database in order to provide smootherintegration between the client and the server. The intent has always been to make this systemglobal, however having clients attach to a single server from across the world is not workable. So, insteadof bringing the clients to the server, it was decided to distribute the repository to bring the information closer to the clients. Using Gemstone’s GemEnterprise,a repository is placed in eachregion (North America, Europe, etc.) and the information available to the client is synchronized amongstthe distributed repositories. In addition, Lucent provides web access to someof the system’sinformation to its customers. Since cus- tomers cannot access Lucent’s internal network, it is necessary to move the data to the tirewall server. Here again GemEnterpriseis used to federateselected (non-restricted) information to a repository on the firewall server. A special toolkit is then usedto connectthis repository to the web server on the firewall serving Lucent customers. 412