Middleware technologies suchus CORBA or Juvu RMI huve proved their suitubility for "stundurd" clientserver applications. However, challenges fiom existing and new types of upplicutions, including support for multimediu, reul-time requirements und mobility seems to indicute the need for defining U new urchitecture for open distributed systems. The new urchitecture should be designed Ji-om the beginning with flexibility und uduptubility in mind. This can be achieved by defining un open engineering middleware plutjorm thut is run time conjguruble und ullows inspection und uduptution of the underlying components. This puper proposes U next generution middlewure urchitecture thut conforms to requirements us indicated ubove. This urchitecture is churucterised by being open, and uduptuble bused on the principle of reflection. The puper ulso reports on some existing reseurch prototypes with U focus towurds their suitubility us next generution middle wure.
The current research on IT change management has been exploring several aspects of this new discipline, but it usually assumes that changes expressed in Requests for Change (RFC) documents will be successfully executed over the managed IT infrastructure. This assumption, however, is not realistic in actual IT systems because failures during the execution of changes do happen and cannot be ignored. In order to address this issue, we propose a solution where tightly-related change activities are grouped together forming atomic groups of activities. These groups are atomic in the sense that if one activity fails, all other already executed activities of the same group must rollback to move the system backwards to the previous state. The automation of change rollback is especially convenient because it relieves the IT human operator of manually undoing the activities of a change group that has failed. To prove concept and technical feasibility, we have materialized our solution in a prototype system that, using elements of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), is able to control how atomic groups of activities must be handled in IT change management systems.
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