Abstract
Much work has been done in order to make the development of distributed systems as close as sensible to the development of centralized systems. As a result, there are today good distributed object solutions that closely resemble centralized programming. However, this very attempt to mimic centralized programming implies that distributed objects create the illusion that threads traverse the whole distributed application. This brings all the problems related to multi-thread programming, including the need to reason about the thread behavior of the whole application, which gets amplified by the large scale and inherent non-determinism of distributed systems. Moreover, distributed objects present other troubles when the application is not pure client-server, i.e., when the client has other things to do besides waiting for the server.
As an alternative, there are a number of message-based non-blocking communication solutions. Unfortunately, these solutions were not designed to directly address the above mentioned issue of multi-threading over the whole distributed application. In addition: (i) these solutions are not as well integrated to the programming language as distributed objects, and (ii) most of them do not provide a well-defined embedded failure detection mechanism, something that is crucial for the development of many distributed systems, and that is well solved by distributed objects (as they couple method invocation and failure detection).
We here propose and evaluate an improvement for such a status-quo, named JIC (Java Internet Communication). JIC is an event-driven middleware that relies on a non-blocking communication model, yet providing close semantics to the object-oriented paradigm. JIC is designed to combine the best characteristics of distributed objects and message-based solutions. For instance, JIC defines precise scope for the application’s threads, promotes non-blocking communication, provides a failure detection service that is simple to use with precise semantics, and has performance comparable to Java RMI. Furthermore, JIC is designed to be firewall and NAT friendly, greatly helping the deployment of JIC-based applications across multiple administrative domains.
An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11914952_55.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Waldo, J., Wyant, G., Wollrath, A., Kendall, S.: A Note on Distributed Computing. Technical Report SMLI TR-94-29, Sun Microsystems Labs (1994)
Coulouris, G., Dollimore, J.: Distributed systems: concepts and design. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston (2005)
Grosso, W.: Java RMI. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol (2002)
RMI: Java Remote Method Invocation web site (2006), at: java.sun.com/products/jdk/rmi/
CORBA: Common Object Request Broker Architecture Core Specification (2006), at: www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/corba_iiop.htm
Sutter, H., Larus, J.: Software and the concurrency revolution. Queue 3(7), 54–62 (2005)
Lee, E.A.: The problem with threads. Technical Report UCB/EECS-2006-1, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley (2006)
Schmidt, D., Gokhale, A., Harrison, T., Parulkar, G.: A high-performance endsystem architecture for real-time CORBA. IEEE Communications Magazine 4(2) (1997)
Pietzuch, P.R.: Event-based middleware: A new paradigm for wide-area distributed systems? In: 6th CaberNet Radicals Workshop (2002)
Starovic, G., Cahill, V., Tangney, B.: An event based object model for distributed programming. In: OOIS (Object-Oriented Information Systems 1995), pp. 72–86. Springer, London (1995)
DS-online: Distributed Systems Online web site. Message Oriented Middleware section (2006), at: dsonline.computer.org/middleware/intro_MOM.html
Monson-Haefel, R., Chappell, D.: Java Message Service. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol (2000)
Sunderam, V.S.: PVM: a framework for parallel distributed computing. Concurrency, Practice and Experience 2(4), 315–340 (1990)
Forum, M.P.I.: MPI: A message-passing interface standard. Technical Report UT-CS-94-230 (1994)
Cirne, W., Brasileiro, F., Andrade, N., Costa, L., Andrade, A., Novaes, R., Mowbray, M.: Labs of the world, unite!!! (accepted for publication in Journal of Grid Computing), available at: walfredo.dsc.ufcg.edu.br/papers/LabsoftheWorldUnitev19.pdf
Dantas, A., Cirne, W., Saikoski, K.: Using aop to bring a project back in shape: The ourgrid case. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society 11(3), 21–35 (2006)
JSF: Jabber software foundation web site (2006), at: www.jabber.org/
XMPP: Extensible messaging and presence protocol specification (2006), at: www.xmpp.org/specs/
Deng, X., Dwyer, M.B., Hatcliff, J., Mizuno, M.: Invariant-based specification, synthesis, and verification of synchronization in concurrent programs (2002)
Hayashibara, N., Defago, X., Yared, R., Katayama, T.: The phi accrual failure detector. In: Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2004), pp. 66–78. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2004)
Felber, P., Défago, X., Guerraoui, R., Oser, P.: Failure detectors as first class objects. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA 1999), Edinburgh, Scotland, pp. 132–141 (1999)
Tomlinson, R.S.: Selecting sequence numbers. In: Proceedings of the 1975 ACM SIGCOMM/SIGOPS workshop on Interprocess communications, pp. 11–23. ACM Press, New York (1975)
Henderson-Sellers, B.: Object-Oriented Metrics: Measures of Complexity. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1995)
Schmidt, D., Vinoski, S.: Object interconnections: Programming asynchronous method invocations with corba messaging (1999)
Object-Management-Group: Corba messaging specification, omg document orbos/98- 05-05 ed. (1998)
Vinoski, S.: New features for corba 3.0. Commun. ACM 41(10), 44–52 (1998)
Raje, R., William, J., Boyles, M.: An asynchronous remote method invocation (ARMI) mechanism for java. In: ACM Workshop on Java for Science and Engineering Computation, ACM Press, New York (1997)
Falkner, K.E.K., Coddington, P.D., Oudshoorn, M.J.: Implementing Asynchronous Remote Method Invocation in Java. Technical Report DHPC-072 (1999)
MQSeries: IBM MQSeries web site (2006), at: www.ibm.com/software/mqseries
Loughran, S., Smith, E.: Rethinking the Java SOAP Stack. Technical Report HPL-2005-83, Hewlett-Packard Bristol Laboratories (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lima, A., Cirne, W., Brasileiro, F., Fireman, D. (2006). A Case for Event-Driven Distributed Objects. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2006: CoopIS, DOA, GADA, and ODBASE. OTM 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4276. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11914952_46
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11914952_46
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-48274-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48283-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)