IKE 2-implementing the stateful distributed object paradigm

Abstract

This paper describes IKE 2, which is distributed object computing middleware that supports the creation of interoperable realtime distributed applications. These applications appear in many domains, such as telecom, aerospace, military testing and training ranges, and financial services. IKE 2 combines the concepts of CORBA distributed objects and anonymous publish-subscribe data dissemination to provide a programming abstraction known as a stateful distributed object (SDO).Every SDO can have both a remote method interface and publication state. The remote method interface allows client applications to invoke methods on target objects efficiently without concern for their location, programming language, OS platform, communication protocols and interconnects, or hardware. The publication state of a given SDO is disseminated to applications that have expressed their interest by subscribing to certain characteristics, such as the type of the SDO. Subscribers can read the publication state of an SDO as if it were a local object. The SDOs provided by the IKE 2 metaobject model support inheritance from other SDOs, containment of other SDOs, and references to other SDOs.IKE 2 is implemented in C++. The API relies heavily on compile-time type-safety to help ensure reliable behavior at runtime-a critical feature of any real-time system. Automatic code generation is used to provide the high-level abstractions without unduly burdening application programmers.

Applying model-driven development to distributed real-time and embedded avionics systems

“…The next step in achieving our goal was to use the OCML tool to generate the possible configurations for the component under test. 3 Using the documentation generated by OCML CFG, we narrowed down the configuration space for the Nav Display component: Further examination of this reduced configuration space reveals that some of the configurations settings can be set a priori, i.e., without experimentation. For example, the component interacts with only one source and do not need synchronization.…”

Patterns, frameworks, and middleware: their synergistic relationships

“…However, the patterns and frameworks described here are not limited to middleware. In fact, they have been applied in many other application domains, including telecom call processing [32] and switching [8], airplane flight control systems [15], multimedia videoconferencing [33], distributed interactive simulations [34], and enterprise business applications [20].…”

Model-Driven Configuration and Deployment of Component Middleware Publish/Subscribe Services

“…mission computing [6,7], distributed audio/video processing [8,9], and distributed interactive simulations [10,11]) since they help reduce software dependencies and enhance system composability and evolution. In particular, the publish/subscribe architecture [12] of event-based communication allows application components to interact anonymously and asynchronously [13].…”