Abstract
Middleware has emerged as an important architectural component in modern distributed systems. Most recently, industry has witnessed the emergence of component-based middleware platforms, such as Enterprise JavaBeans and the CORBA Component Model, aimed at supporting third party development, configuration and subsequent deployment of software. The goal of our research is to extend this work in order to exploit the benefits of component-based approaches within the middleware platform as well as on top of the platform, the result being more configurable and reconfigurable middleware technologies. This is achieved through a marriage of components with reflection, the latter providing the necessary levels of openness to access the underlying component infrastructure. More specifically, the paper describes in detail the OpenCOM component model, a lightweight and efficient component model based on COM. The paper also describes how OpenCOM can be used to construct a full middleware platform, and also investigates the performance of both OpenCOM and this resultant platform. The main overall contribution of the paper is to demonstrate that flexible middleware technologies can be developed without an adverse effect on the performance of resultant systems
On leave from Lancaster University
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Blair G.S., Coulson G., Robin P. and Papathomas M., “An Architecture for Next Generation Middleware”, Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing (Middleware’98), Davies N.A.J., Raymond K. & Seitz J. (Eds.), The Lake District, UK, pp. 191–206, 15–18 September 1998.
Blair, G.S., Coulson, G., Andersen, A., Blair, L., Clarke, M., Costa, F., Duran-Limon, H., Fitzpatrick, T., Johnston, L., Moreira, R., Parlavantzas, N., Saikoski, K., “The Design and Implementation of OpenORB v2”, To appear in IEEE DS Online, Special Issue on Reflective Middleware, 2001.
Brown, K., “Building a Lightweight COM Interception Framework Part 1: The Universal Delegator”, Microsoft Systems Journal, January 1999.
Costa, F., Duran, H., Parlavantzas, N., Saikoski, K., Blair, G.S., and Coulson, G., “The Role of Reflective Middleware in Supporting the Engineering of Dynamic Applications”. In Walter Cazzola, Robert J. Stroud and Francesco Tisato, editors, Reflection and Software Engineering, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1826. Springer-Verlag, 2000
Coulson, G., “A Configurable Multimedia Middleware Platform”, IEEE Multimedia, Vol 6, pp 62–76, No 1, January–March 1999.
J. Helander and A. Forin. “MMLite: A Highly Componentized System Architecture”. In Proc. of the Eighth ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, pp 96–103, Sintra, Portugal, September 1998.
Kiczales, G., des Rivières, J., and Bobrow, D.G., “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol”, MIT Press, 1991.
Knuth, D.E., “The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms”, Second Edition, Reading, Massachusetts, USA, Addison Wesley, 1973.
Kon, F., Román, M., Liu, P., Mao, J., Yamane, T., Magalhães, L.C., and Campbell, R.H., “Monitoring, Security, and Dynamic Configuration with the dynamicTAO Reflective ORB”. IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing (Middleware’2000). New York. April 3–7, 2000.
Microsoft, “The Component Object Model Specification”, http://www.microsoft.com/com/resources/comdocs.asp. Last updated: 15/04/1999.
Microsoft, COM Home Page, http://www.microsoft.com/com/default.asp. Last updated: 01/06/2000.
Microsoft, Net Home Page, http://www.microsoft.com/net. Last updated: 01/02/2001.
Mozilla Organization, XPCOM project, 2001, http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom
Object Management Group, “CORBA Components” Final Submission, OMG Document orbos/99-02-05.
A. Reid, M. Flatt, L. Stoller, J. Lepreau, E. Eide “Knit: Component Composition for Systems Software”. In proceedings of 4th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2000), Usenix Association, pp. 347–360, October 2000.
Roman, M., Mickunas, D., Kon, F., and Campbell, R.H., IFIP/ACM Middleware’2000 Workshop on Reflective Middleware. IBM Palisades Executive Conference Center, NY, April 2000.
Rogerson, D., “Inside COM”, Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA, 1997.
Szyperski, C., “Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming”, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Sun Microsystems, “Enterprise JavaBeans Specification Version 1.1”, http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/index.html.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Clarke, M., Blair, G.S., Coulson, G., Parlavantzas, N. (2001). An Efficient Component Model for the Construction of Adaptive Middleware. In: Guerraoui, R. (eds) Middleware 2001. Middleware 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45518-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45518-3_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42800-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45518-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive