Software engineering and middleware: a roadmap (Invited talk)

The construction of a large class of distributed systems can be simplified by leveraging middleware, which is layered between network operating systems and application components. Middleware resolves heterogeneity and facilitates communication and coordination of distributed components. Existing middleware products enable software engineers to build systems that are distributed across a local-area network. State-of-the-art middleware research aims to push this boundary towards Internet-scale distribution, adaptive and reconfigurable middleware and middleware for dependable and wireless systems. The challenge for software engineering research is to devise notations, techniques, methods and tools for distributed system construction that systematically build and exploit the capabilities that middleware deliver

Unification of Transactions and Replication in Three-Tier Architectures Based on CORBA

In this paper, we describe a software infrastructure that unifies transactions and replication in three-tier architectures and provides data consistency and high availability for enterprise applications. The infrastructure uses transactions based on the CORBA object transaction service to protect the application data in databases on stable storage, using a roll-backward recovery strategy, and replication based on the fault tolerant CORBA standard to protect the middle-tier servers, using a roll-forward recovery strategy. The infrastructure replicates the middle-tier servers to protect the application business logic processing. In addition, it replicates the transaction coordinator, which renders the two-phase commit protocol nonblocking and, thus, avoids potentially long service disruptions caused by failure of the coordinator. The infrastructure handles the interactions between the replicated middle-tier servers and the database servers through replicated gateways that prevent duplicate requests from reaching the database servers. It implements automatic client-side failover mechanisms, which guarantee that clients know the outcome of the requests that they have made, and retries aborted transactions automatically on behalf of the clients

Using real options to select stable Middleware-induced software architectures

The requirements that force decisions towards building distributed system architectures are usually of a non-functional nature. Scalability, openness, heterogeneity, and fault-tolerance are examples of such non-functional requirements. The current trend is to build distributed systems with middleware, which provide the application developer with primitives for managing the complexity of distribution, system resources, and for realising many of the non-functional requirements. As non-functional requirements evolve, the `coupling' between the middleware and architecture becomes the focal point for understanding the stability of the distributed software system architecture in the face of change. It is hypothesised that the choice of a stable distributed software architecture depends on the choice of the underlying middleware and its flexibility in responding to future changes in non-functional requirements. Drawing on a case study that adequately represents a medium-size component-based distributed architecture, it is reported how a likely future change in scalability could impact the architectural structure of two versions, each induced with a distinct middleware: one with CORBA and the other with J2EE. An option-based model is derived to value the flexibility of the induced-architectures and to guide the selection. The hypothesis is verified to be true for the given change. The paper concludes with some observations that could stimulate future research in the area of relating requirements to software architectures

Design and Performance of a Fault-Tolerant Real-Time CORBA Event Service

Developing distributed real-time and embedded (DRE)systems in which multiple quality-of-service (QoS) dimen-sions must be managed is an important and challenging R&D problem. This paper makes three contributions to re-search on multi-dimensional QoS for DRE systems. First, itdescribes the design and implementation of a fault-tolerantreal-time CORBA event service for The ACE ORB (TAO).Second, it describes our enhancements and extensions tofeatures in TAO, to integrate real-time and fault toleranceproperties. Third, it presents an empirical evaluation ofour approach. Our results show that with some refinements,real-time and fault-tolerance features can be integrated ef-fectively and efficiently in a CORBA event service

Markup meets middleware

We describe a distributed system architecture that supports the integration of different front-office trading systems with middle and back-office systems, each of which have been procured from different vendors. The architecture uses a judicious combination of object-oriented middleware and markup languages. In this combination an object request broker implements reliable trade data transport. Markup languages, particularly XML, are used to address data integration problems. We show that the strengths of middleware and markup languages are complementary and discuss the benefits of deploying middleware and markup languages in a synergistic manner

Multicast-Based Interactive-Group Object-Replication For Fault Tolerance

Distributed systems are clusters of computers working together on one task. The sharing of information across different architectures, and the timely and efficient use of the network resources for communication among computers are some of the problems involved in the implementation of a distributed system. In the case of a low latency system, the network utilization and the responsiveness of the communication mechanism are even more critical. This thesis introduces a new approach for the distribution of messages to computers in the system, in which, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is used in conjunction with IP multicast to implement a fault-tolerant, low latency distributed system. Fault tolerance is achieved by replication of the current state of the system across several hosts. An update of the current state is initiated by a client application that contacts one of the state object replicas. The new information needs to be distributed to all the members of the distributed system (the object replicas). This state update is accomplished by using a two-phase commit protocol, which is implemented using a binary tree structure along with IP multicast to reduce the amount of network utilization, distribute the computation load associated with state propagation, and to achieve faster communication among the members of the distributed system. The use of IP multicast enhances the speed of message distribution, while the two-phase commit protocol encapsulates IP multicast to produce a reliable multicast service that is suitable for fault tolerant, distributed low latency applications. The binary tree structure, finally, is essential for the load sharing of the state commit response collection processing

A Performance Analysis of Distributed Algorithms in JavaSpaces, CORBA Services and Web Services

Implementation of distributed parallel algorithms on networked computers has always been very difficult until the introduction of service-oriented architectures (SOA) like JavaSpaces service, CORBA services and Web Services. Algorithms of the type Master/Worker pattern are implemented with relative ease using the SOAs. This project analyzes the performance of such algorithms on three contemporary SOAs namely JavaSpaces service, CORBA services and Web Services. These architectures make the implementations of distributed algorithms reasonably fault tolerant and highly and dynamically scalable. Also, the systems built on these architectures are generally loosely coupled and operate asynchronously. In this project we measure and analyze the latency, speed-up and efficiency metrics of an insertion sort of 0 (n^2) complexity on all the three SOAs. We then draw conclusions of overall performance and scalability on all the three architectures