The design of a configurable and reconfigurable middleware platform

Abstract

It is now well established that middleware platforms must accommodate an increasingly diverse range of requirements arising from the needs of both applications and underlying systems. Moreover, it is clear that to achieve this accommodation, platforms must be capable of both deployment-time configurability and run-time reconfigurability. This paper describes a middleware platform that addresses these requirements. The platform is built using a well-founded lightweight component model, uses reflective techniques to facilitate (re)configuration, and employs the notion of component frameworks to manage and constrain the scope of reconfiguration operations. Importantly, the platform also aims to achieve high performance and a level of standards conformance (e.g., with CORBA and COM). We demonstrate that, despite its high degree of configurability, the platform performs on a par with standard commercial CORBA ORBs.