Application Development Tools and Frameworks

Abstract

Large scale distributed systems are used for executing a wide variety of applications; while the first distributed applications were from the scientific area, today many of them are dedicated to businesses or even to home users. The constantly increasing demand for large scale distributed applications has brought on a need for tools and frameworks that ease their development. The main role of these tools and frameworks is to assist the developer in implementing some common functionalities and patterns that are specific to distributed applications – for example, dividing a large computational task into smaller subtasks to be executed on multiple machines, or sending e-mails automatically, or managing the access to resources in a secure way. One of the most important issues that the application development frameworks have to address is the abstraction of the underlying middleware: their main objective is to relieve the application programmer from the effort of dealing with lowerlevel components. Another important aspect is the performance of the communication among the application components; hence, some development tools are specifically targeted to optimizing the communication performance. We also observe an increasing interest in the interoperability among applications developed with different platforms, which has led to many standardization initiatives. This chapter discusses the issues introduced above, and makes an overview of the current tools and frameworks for developing various types of distributed applications. We start with web applications, which are the most frequently used nowadays; we introduce some general design issues, and present tools for server-side and client-side programming. Then, we discuss about developing applications in grids, clouds and peer-to-peer systems; we present the specific aspects of programming applications in these types of systems and introduce some of the most widely used tools and frameworks. The last section is dedicated to distributed workflows – complex applications that are composed of multiple smaller applications or services; the development and execution of workflows poses more challenges compared to traditional applications, requiring specific tools and runtime environments.