ECOOP / Workshop 03

Communication Abstractions for Distributed Systems

Abstract

As applications become increasingly distributed and networks provide more and more connection facilities, applications require more and more interconnections, thus communication takes a central part of modern systems. To tackle the communication issues, a lot of techniques and concepts have been developed in different research fields and some industrial solutions have been proposed. Over the last 15 years, the basic building blocks for distributed object systems have emerged: distributed objects, communicating with Remote Message Send (RMS), also known as Remote Method Invocation (RMI) or Location-Independent Invocation (LII). However, it has also become clear that while such abstractions are by themselves sufficient to expose the hard problems of distributed computing, they do not solve them. Hence, since large applications parts have been underlined like databases systems or graphical user interface, the goal is to wonder, if can we say the same for the communication part of applications?

At the previous ECOOP workshops on The Next 701 Distributed Object Systems, we identified some of these problems (Security, Partial Failure, Guaranteeing Quality of Service, Run-time evolution, Meta-Object protocols, and Ordering of events) that are important concerns of any communication abstraction. Some Communication Abstractions were identified at ECOOP'2002 in Malaga such as Peer-to-peer abstract data structure, or publish/subscribe variants. The goal of this workshop is to work on the definition of new and good communication abstractions and on the distributed-specific features mentioned above.

Main Topics

• Communication abstractions from various origins including:
• Architecture Description Languages (ADL), and especially connectors
• UML collaboration as communication abstractions
• UML collaboration refinement and implementation
• Coordination techniques
• Middleware services
• Mediators
• Glueware techniques
• Communication abstraction in programming languages
• Design Patterns for communication and distribution
• Composition of protocols, customizable communication frameworks, (was micro-protocols)
• Communication components
• Security:
• Authentication, authorization, privacy
• Protection from malicious hackers
• What can run where?
• Application Services:
• Mobility
• Migration
• Persistence
• Other Communication Protocols (beyond RMS)
• Publish & Subscribe
• Data-centric computing, e.g., real-rate ows
• Group-oriented communication
• Tolerance of Partial Failures:
• Transactions
• Alternatives to transactions
• Run-time Evolution:
• of classes and interfaces
• of persistent data
• Meta-Object protocols, e.g., changing the meaning of message send
• Ordering of events
• Peer to peer computing

Paper Submission

Details

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