EDOC: meeting the challenges of enterprise computing

An increasing demand for interoperable applications exists, sparking the real-time exchange of data across borders, applications, and IT platforms. To perform these tasks, enterprise computing now encompasses a new class of groundbreaking technologies such as Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA); business process integration and management; and middleware support, like that for utility, grid, peer-to-peer, and autonomic computing. Enterprise computing also influences the processes for business modeling, consulting, and service delivery; it affects the design, development, and deployment of software architecture, as well as the monitoring and management of such architecture. As enterprises demand increasing levels of networked information and services to carry out business processes, IT professionals need conferences like EDOC to discuss emerging technologies and issues in enterprise computing. For these reasons, what started out as the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) conference has come to encompass much more than just distributed objects. So this event now used the name International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference, to recognize this broader scope yet also retain the initial conference's name recognition

A semi-formal comparison between the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (COBRA) and the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)

The way in which application systems and software are built has changed dramatically over the past few years. This is mainly due to advances in hardware technology, programming languages, as well as the requirement to build better software application systems in less time. The importance of mondial (worldwide) communication between systems is also growing exponentially. People are using network-based applications daily, communicating not only locally, but also globally. The Internet, the global network, therefore plays a significant role in the development of new software. Distributed object computing is one of the computing paradigms that promise to solve the need to develop clienVserver application systems, communicating over heterogeneous environments. This study, of limited scope, concentrates on one crucial element without which distributed object computing cannot be implemented. This element is the communication software, also called middleware, which allows objects situated on different hardware platforms to communicate over a network. Two of the most important middleware standards for distributed object computing today are the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) from the Object Management Group, and the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) from Microsoft Corporation. Each of these standards is implemented in commercially available products, allowing distributed objects to communicate over heterogeneous networks. In studying each of the middleware standards, a formal way of comparing CORBA and DCOM is presented, namely meta-modelling. For each of these two distributed object infrastructures (middleware), meta-models are constructed. Based on this uniform and unbiased approach, a comparison of the two distributed object infrastructures is then performed. The results are given as a set of tables in which the differences and similarities of each distributed object infrastructure are exhibited. By adopting this approach, errors caused by misunderstanding or misinterpretation are minimised. Consequently, an accurate and unbiased comparison between CORBA and DCOM is made possible, which constitutes the main aim of this dissertation.ComputingM. Sc. (Computer Science

Abstract Platform and Transformations for Model-Driven Service-Oriented Development

In this paper, we discuss the use of abstract platforms and transformation for designing applications according to the principles of the service-oriented architecture. We illustrate our approach by discussing the use of the service discovery pattern at a platform-independent design level. We show how a trader service can be specified at a high-level of abstraction and incorporated in an abstract platform for service-oriented development. Designers can then build platform-independent models of applications by composing application parts with this abstract platform. Application parts can use the trader service to publish and discover service offers. We discuss how the abstract platform can be realized into two target platforms, namely Web Services (with UDDI) and CORBA (with the OMG trader)

On Designing Multicore-aware Simulators for Biological Systems

The stochastic simulation of biological systems is an increasingly popular technique in bioinformatics. It often is an enlightening technique, which may however result in being computational expensive. We discuss the main opportunities to speed it up on multi-core platforms, which pose new challenges for parallelisation techniques. These opportunities are developed in two general families of solutions involving both the single simulation and a bulk of independent simulations (either replicas of derived from parameter sweep). Proposed solutions are tested on the parallelisation of the CWC simulator (Calculus of Wrapped Compartments) that is carried out according to proposed solutions by way of the FastFlow programming framework making possible fast development and efficient execution on multi-cores.Comment: 19 pages + cover pag