This document provides the common distributed application protocol (CDAP) specification. CDAP enables distributed applications to deal with communications at an object level, rather than forcing applications to explicitly deal with serialization and input/output operations. CDAP provides the application protocol component of a distributed application facility (DAF). CDAP provides a straightforward and unifying approach to sharing data over a network without having to create specialized protocols.

This document provides:

—     an overview of CDAP;

—     the specification of CDAP;

—     a description of policies, in the specific sense introduced in the text;

—     notes on the context of CDAP.