Middleware support for coordination in distributed applications

Abstract

The current state of the art of existing middleware technologies does not support the development of distributed applications that need processes to complete a task collaboratively. We extend current middleware technologies with multiparty interaction rather than design a new distributed programming language for application developers. An object adapter for coordination running as a component provides support for the coordinated applications by isolating, encapsulating, and managing a component's interactions outside the component. Dynamic interface binding was designed to allow an adapter to examine the signature of the requested services at runtime such as operation names, parameter orders, parameter types, and parameter sizes. The interfaces of interconnecting components are bound at runtime. In addition, the interface language mapping allows an interface in a specific programming language to be automatically generated from an IP (interacting processes)-like IDL (IP-IDL) interface. The use of IP-IDL for coordination simplifies the development of distributed applications for coordination.