Abstract

The Arctic Beans project is investigating the area of «Configurable and Re-configurable Enterprise Component Architectures». The general aim of this research is to develop more open and flexible middleware technologies, focusing on enterprise (or server-side) component architecture (such as Enterprise JavaBeans or the CORBA Component Model). The great benefit of such technologies is that they encourage re-use of components developed by third-party suppliers, and also manage distribution implicitly through the concept of a container. This works well for a significant number of application domains. However, there is increasing evidence that there are problems with this approach as the technology is applied in other areas (e.g. in mobile computing). The reason for this is that enterprise component architectures tend to enforce a certain style of distribution management in terms of, for example, the approach to persistence, security, and transactions, or the general model of interaction implied by the approach. We seek a more flexible technology that allows such elements to be configured at installation time, and re-configured at run-time.

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