Efficient Proxies in Smalltalk

International audienceA proxy object is a surrogate or placeholder that controls access to another target object. Proxy objects are a widely used solution for different scenarios such as remote method invocation, future objects, behavioral reflection, object databases, inter-languages communications and bindings, access control, lazy or parallel evaluation, security, among others. Most proxy implementations support proxies for regular objects but they are unable to create proxies for classes or methods. Proxies can be complex to install, have a significant overhead, be limited to certain type of classes, etc. Moreover, most proxy implementations are not stratified at all and there is no separation between proxies and handlers. In this paper, we present Ghost, a uniform, light-weight and stratified general purpose proxy model and its Smalltalk implementation.Ghost supports proxies for classes or methods. When a proxy takes the place of a class it intercepts both, messages received by the class and lookup of methods for messages received by instances. Similarly, if a proxy takes the place of a method, then the method execution is intercepted too

Ghost: A uniform and general-purpose proxy implementation

International audienceA proxy object is a surrogate or placeholder that controls access to another target object. Proxy objects are a widely used solution for different scenarios such as remote method invocation, future objects, behavioral reflection, object databases, inter-languages communications and bindings, access control, lazy or parallel evaluation, security, among others. Most proxy implementations support proxies for regular objects but are unable to create proxies for objects with an important role in the runtime infrastructure such as classes or methods. Proxies can be complex to install, they can have a significant overhead, they can be limited to certain kind of classes, etc. Moreover, proxy implementations are often not stratified and they do not have a clear separation between proxies (the objects intercepting messages) and handlers (the objects handling interceptions). In this paper, we present Ghost: a uniform and general-purpose proxy implementation for the Pharo programming language. Ghost provides low memory consuming proxies for regular objects as well as for classes and methods. When a proxy takes the place of a class, it intercepts both the messages received by the class and the lookup of methods for messages received by its instances. Similarly, if a proxy takes the place of a method, then the method execution is intercepted too

Loadable Smart Proxies and Native-Code Shipping for CORBA

Middleware platforms such as CORBA are widely considered as a promising technology path towards a universal service market. For now, however, no mechanisms are offered for dynamically integrating service-specific code (so-called smart proxies) at the client which is a major prerequisite for the development of generic clients that may connect to different service implementations offering different quality-of-service guarantees. In this paper, we therefore demonstrate how support for smart proxies can be integrated within CORBA by means of a native-code shipping service that only relies on the recent objects-by-value extension and portable-interceptors proposal. The feasibility of this approach is shown by a smart-proxy supported video service

Loadable Smart Proxies and Native-Code Shipping for CORBA

Middleware platforms such as CORBA are widely considered as a promising technology path towards a universal service market. For now

Adaptive Caching of Distributed Components

Die Zugriffslokalität referenzierter Daten ist eine wichtige Eigenschaft verteilter Anwendungen. Lokales Zwischenspeichern abgefragter entfernter Daten (Caching) wird vielfach bei der Entwicklung solcher Anwendungen eingesetzt, um diese Eigenschaft auszunutzen. Anschliessende Zugriffe auf diese Daten können so beschleunigt werden, indem sie aus dem lokalen Zwischenspeicher bedient werden. Gegenwärtige Middleware-Architekturen bieten dem Anwendungsprogrammierer jedoch kaum Unterstützung für diesen nicht-funktionalen Aspekt. Die vorliegende Arbeit versucht deshalb, Caching als separaten, konfigurierbaren Middleware-Dienst auszulagern. Durch die Einbindung in den Softwareentwicklungsprozess wird die frühzeitige Modellierung und spätere Wiederverwendung caching-spezifischer Metadaten gewährleistet. Zur Laufzeit kann sich das entwickelte System außerdem bezüglich der Cachebarkeit von Daten adaptiv an geändertes Nutzungsverhalten anpassen.Locality of reference is an important property of distributed applications. Caching is typically employed during the development of such applications to exploit this property by locally storing queried data: Subsequent accesses can be accelerated by serving their results immediately form the local store. Current middleware architectures however hardly support this non-functional aspect. The thesis at hand thus tries outsource caching as a separate, configurable middleware service. Integration into the software development lifecycle provides for early capturing, modeling, and later reuse of cachingrelated metadata. At runtime, the implemented system can adapt to caching access characteristics with respect to data cacheability properties, thus healing misconfigurations and optimizing itself to an appropriate configuration. Speculative prefetching of data probably queried in the immediate future complements the presented approach