An approach to distributed component-based real-time application software development

Component-based software development would allow application software to be largely constructed rather than programmed. This approach would dramatically improve the productivity of software development. Although there are many reusable software packages available, the integration of the chosen parts remains a very difficult problem because there are many barriers of integration, including programming languages, operating systems, communication mechanism, interface, etc. In this paper, an approach to developing real-time application software based on a distributed component architecture and cross-platform and cross-language integration of these software components is presented. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is used in the implementation. The distributed components will satisfy easy retrieval and integration over a heterogeneous distributed system environment. A component replication mechanism is used for providing fault-tolerance. Using object adapters with a real-time request monitor and scheduler that are transparently generated by a distributed component integration tool, real-time and fault-tolerance features can be easily incorporated in the application software.