Monitoring distributed object and component communication

This thesis presents our work in the area of monitoring distributed software applications (DSAs). We produce three main results: (1) a design approach for building monitoring systems, (2) a design of a system for MOnitoring Distributed Object and Component Communication (MODOCC) behavior in middleware-based applications, and (3) a proof-of-concept implementation of this system

Monitoring extensions for component-based distributed software

This paper defines a generic class of monitoring extensions to component-based distributed enterprise software. Introducing a monitoring extension to a legacy application system can be very costly. In this paper, we identify the minimum support for application monitoring within the generic components of a distributed system, necessary for rapid development of new monitoring extensions. Furthermore, this paper offers an approach for design and implementation of monitoring extensions at reduced cost. A framework of basic facilities supporting the monitoring extensions is presented. These facilities handle different aspects critical to the monitoring process, such as ordering of the generated monitoring events, decoupling of the application components from the components of the monitoring extensions, delivery of the monitoring events to multiple consumers, etc.\ud The work presented in this paper is being validated in the prototype of a large distributed system, where a specific monitoring extension is built as a tool for debugging and testing the application behaviour.\u

Monitoring of distributed component interactions

We have describe a generic monitoring approach that can be used to enhance the quality of distributed component software. The generality of the approach is achieved through using reflective technology, i.e. CORBA Interceptors, CORBA POA and Java 2 features. A drawback of using interceptors is the fact that their interfaces have not been standardised so far. However, the process of standardisation is ongoing and has recently resulted in an OMG Joint Revised Submission called Portable Interceptors. Although the Java 2 API enables discovery of ‘forks’ in the execution, we find it lacking functionality for the purpose of discovering synchronisation points (e.g., ‘joins’) within multithreaded components

TINA components used for service dubscription and deployment

This paper presents a TINA-based services platform for deploying and provisioning of services, especially services supporting dynamic communication processes between individuals, such as required for distributed teamwork. The paper gives an overview of the platform architecture, and discusses two topics in more detail: (1) the Distributed Software Component (DSC) framework, which considerably facilitates the development of components from which the platform is built, and (2) some specific components of the platform, which play a crucial role in service management and deployment. In addition, a brief\ud evaluation of CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) ORBs (Object Request Broker) is given, based on the experience of using CORBA as the underlying distributed processing environment for the platform

A distributed computational model for Reo.

The work described in this document aims at producing a formal computational model for the Reo coordination language, that can facilitate the implementation of Reo circuits in a distributed computing environment. The model introduced here partially covers what Reo requires - it implements a less strict form of the merge behavior of mixed nodes. While this already allows computing of a large class of useful circuits, it does not properly deal with some synchronous circuits that contain LossySync channels. This work has lead to a new and more powerful approach to computing the behavior of Reo circuits, called Connector Colorin

Monitoring of Distributed Component Interactions

This paper presents a framework for monitoring component interactions. It is part of a larger component framework built on top of the CORBA distributed processing environment that supports development and testing of distributed software applications. The proposed framework considers an OMG IDL specification as a contract for distributed interactions and allows precise monitoring of interaction activities between application components. The developer is not burdened with monitoring issues because all the necessary code instrumentation is done automatically. The tester is given the opportunity to use monitoring facilities for observing interactions between distributed component applications. This paper explains the monitoring framework and reasons about its expressive power, accuracy and applicability. The approach is validated in a platform for design, development and deployment of on-line services. 1. Introduction Distributed applications are becoming one of the major types of sof..

Compositional construction of web services using Reo

A Web Service can represent a unit of business logic that an organization exposes to other organizations on the World Wide Web. The recent efforts of the industry to agree on a common definition for Web Services resulted in the Web Services (WS) standard that governs how one defines, advertises and uses Web Services. Composition of primitive Web Services into complex ones presents the next challenge for the industry. Existing proposals for languages for service composition (also called choreography of Web services) typically come from the business process modeling community and often lack foundations in theoretical computer science and possibilities to address compo-sition from a more general perspective than business process applications only. In this paper we present our work-in-progress on compositional construction of Web Services using the Reo coordination language. The Reo language has a strong formal basis and promotes loose coupling, distribution, mobility, exoge-nous coordination, and dynamic reconfigurability. We carry out this work within the context of the Cybernetics Incident Management (CIM) project