Leveraging legacy codes to distributed problem solving environments: A web service approach

This paper describes techniques used to leverage high performance legacy codes as CORBA components to a distributed problem solving environment. It first briefly introduces the software architecture adopted by the environment. Then it presents a CORBA oriented wrapper generator (COWG) which can be used to automatically wrap high performance legacy codes as CORBA components. Two legacy codes have been wrapped with COWG. One is an MPI-based molecular dynamic simulation (MDS) code, the other is a finite element based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for simulating incompressible Navier-Stokes flows. Performance comparisons between runs of the MDS CORBA component and the original MDS legacy code on a cluster of workstations and on a parallel computer are also presented. Wrapped as CORBA components, these legacy codes can be reused in a distributed computing environment. The first case shows that high performance can be maintained with the wrapped MDS component. The second case shows that a Web user can submit a task to the wrapped CFD component through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the component. In this way, a user’s desktop computing environment can be extended to a high performance computing environment using a cluster of workstations or a parallel computer

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

Inter-Domain Integration of Services and Service Management

The evolution of the global telecommunications industry into an open services market presents developers of telecommunication service and management systems with many new challenges. Increased competition, complex service provision chains and integrated service offerings require effective techniques for the rapid integration of service and management systems over multiple organisational domains. These integration issues have been examined in the ACTS project Prospect by developing a working set of integrated, managed telecommunications services for a user trial. This paper presents the initial results of this work detailing the technologies and standards used, the architectural approach taken and the application of this approach to specific services

Information integration platform for CIMS

A new information integration platform for computer integrated manufacturing system (CIMS) is presented, which is based on agent and CORBA. CORBA enhances the system integration because it is an industry-standard for interoperable, distributed objects across heterogeneous hardware and software platform. Agent technology is used to improve intelligence of the integration system. In order to implement the information integration platform, we use a network integration server to integrate the network, design a generic database agent to integrate database, adopt multi-agent based architecture to integrate application, and utilize wrapper as a CORBA object to integrate legacy code.published_or_final_versio

Integrating legacy mainframe systems: architectural issues and solutions

For more than 30 years, mainframe computers have been the backbone of computing systems throughout the world. Even today it is estimated that some 80% of the worlds' data is held on such machines. However, new business requirements and pressure from evolving technologies, such as the Internet is pushing these existing systems to their limits and they are reaching breaking point. The Banking and Financial Sectors in particular have been relying on mainframes for the longest time to do their business and as a result it is they that feel these pressures the most. In recent years there have been various solutions for enabling a re-engineering of these legacy systems. It quickly became clear that to completely rewrite them was not possible so various integration strategies emerged. Out of these new integration strategies, the CORBA standard by the Object Management Group emerged as the strongest, providing a standards based solution that enabled the mainframe applications become a peer in a distributed computing environment. However, the requirements did not stop there. The mainframe systems were reliable, secure, scalable and fast, so any integration strategy had to ensure that the new distributed systems did not lose any of these benefits. Various patterns or general solutions to the problem of meeting these requirements have arisen and this research looks at applying some of these patterns to mainframe based CORBA applications. The purpose of this research is to examine some of the issues involved with making mainframebased legacy applications inter-operate with newer Object Oriented Technologies

Evaluating the integration of supply chain information systems: A case study

Supply chain management (SCM) is the integrated management of business links, information flows and people. It is with this frame of reference that information systems integration from both intra- and inter-organisational levels becomes significant. Enterprise application integration (EAI) has emerged as software technologies to address the issue of integrating the portfolio of SCM components both within organisations and through cross-enterprises. EAI is based on a diversity of integration technologies (e.g. message brokers, ebXML) that differ in the type and level of integration they offer. However, none of these technologies claim to be a panacea to overcoming all integration problems but rather, need to be pieced together to support the linking of diverse applications that often exist within supply chains. In exploring the evaluation of supply chain integration, the authors propose a framework for evaluating the portfolio of integration technologies that are used to unify inter-organisational and intra-organisational information systems. The authors define and classify the permutations of information systems available according to their characteristics and integration requirements. These, classifications of system types are then adopted as part of the evaluation framework and empirically tested within a case study

Proposing a secure component-based-application logic and system’s integration testing approach

Software engineering moved from traditional methods of software enterprise applications to com-ponent based development for distributed system’s applications. This new era has grown up forlast few years, with component-based methods, for design and rapid development of systems, butfact is that , deployment of all secure software features of technology into practical e-commercedistributed systems are higher rated target for intruders. Although most of research has been con-ducted on web application services that use a large share of the present software, but on the otherside Component Based Software in the middle tier ,which rapidly develops application logic, alsoopen security breaching opportunities .This research paper focus on a burning issue for researchersand scientists ,a weakest link in component based distributed system, logical attacks, that cannotbe detected with any intrusion detection system within the middle tier e-commerce distributed ap-plications. We proposed An Approach of Secure Designing application logic for distributed system,while dealing with logically vulnerability issue

A Unified Accounting Information Framework To Modeling Bank Accounting Systems

This paper discusses the use of distributed middlewares as essential tools for facilitating electronic exchange of standard business document between managers, financial institutes, and trading partners in the banking sector. Internally, companies can benefit by creating information architectures that allow systems to easily exchange data. One less expensive and disruptive option that applies to most banks/financial institutes is used traditional mainframe (legacy) system with an array of distributed middlewares to overcome the aforementioned limitations. This paper focuses on developing a new distributed processing architecture based on client-server technology called UAIF – Unified Accounting Information Framework. UAIF is designed to assist managers/financial institutes with a transparent access to information anywhere on the LAN or WAN from any desktop and to meet management specific needs so that some of the accounting and financial works can be widely used for World Wide Web (WWW) applications via Internet or Intranet.  For concept verification, we utilize UAIF to modeling a bank accounting system, which is based on an industrial standard CORBA architecture, XML and OMG General Ledger Facility. This methodology integrates enterprise accounting information system (AIS) with distributed systems via Internet, Intranet, and Electronic Commerce

INTEGRATION VERSUS DEDICATION IN ROMANIAN MANAGEMENT SUPPORT SYSTEMS

The technologies supporting future business must be intuitive from a user standpoint, flexible from design standpoint and highly productive. As an answer to many requirements, analysts recommend the inclusion of SOA and ESB in the IT management strategies, since these tend to become mainstream, overcoming their abstract vision status in the last decade. In this paper, we provide a study regarding the attitude of companies from north-western Romania with respect to this transition and the SOA&ESB models. Our analysis targets attributes such as: level of understanding, knowledge and concern in adopting such technologies, the management involvement in the company IT strategy, the added value of the new technologies and risk factors for the migration towards an SOA&ESB architecture.integration,enterprise applications,web applications,SOA,ESB,framework