Integrering av QuA i OOPP

15.06.2004

Abstract:
Middleware have for quite some time now been the preferred place to develop distributed systems. The main reason for this is that middleware provides a unified programming model which reduces the complexity that is often related to distribution and heterogeneity in general. Current middleware platforms such as CORBA and EJB , to a large extent at least, only provide means to access other components via remote method invocations, and lacks sufficient support for the emerging needs that mobility and multimedia brings about. This introduces the need for something more than the traditional ”black-box” analogy, and this is something that both the QuA project and the OOPP project tries to solve.

The QuA (Quality of Service Aware Component Architecture) project at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo tries to investigate how to develop complex applications with real-time constrains in a component based architecture. This is done by developing prototype applications and conduct experiments to investigate how QoS-management can be done in general-purpose component architecture. QuA is a platform independent QoS aware component architecture which is based on a concept where every unit is build as a module with support to add or remove different modules with regard to the services that is needed.

OOPP (Open-ORB Python prototype), which is an ongoing subproject of the Artic Beans project , is an Object Request Broker (ORB) that is fully developed in Python . OOPP is in resemblance equal to QuA in the way that it too is an configurable and reconfigurable middleware platforms that are based on the concept of reflection and tries to provide a more flexible middleware platform that has the needed support to be used in a multimedia and/or mobile based community.

The Arctic Beans project is concerned with the next generation of middleware and tries to offer a more open and flexible enterprise component technology by means of extending the support for configuring, reconfiguring and development. This research project also tries to focus on security and transaction services and how to accommodate these services to the needs of the application and its running environment. The main application domain is mobile computing. Other non-functional characteristics and application domains are also addressed in order to demonstrate the generality of the selected approach. For more information about the Artic Beans project the reader is referred to [Andersen, 2004].

In this thesis, which is conducted under the Arctic Beans research project at the University of Tromsø, we have developed a middleware programming model that tries to integrate the work which is done in the two middleware platforms QuA and OOPP. Our approach tries to achieve a common solution that can benefit from the strong points of the two platforms. This thesis contributes to the Artic Beans project with a better knowledge of how to design and implement a programming model that makes it possible to integrate and benefit from the work that is being done by the two research projects mentioned.