Quarterware for Middleware.pdfVIP

Quarterware for MiddlewareAshish Singhai Aamod Sane Roy H. CampbellDepartment of Computer Science, University of Illinois1304 W. Springeld Ave., Urbana, IL 61801web: e-mail: {singhai,sane,roy}@AbstractWe make two observations about communications mid-dleware: rst, most middleware are similar, the dierencesare in their interfaces and optimizations; second, neither axed set of abstractions nor a xed implementation of a setof abstractions is likely to be sucient and well-performingfor all applications.Based on these observations, we present Quarterware,a customizable middleware architecture. It abstracts ba-sic middlware functionality, and admits application spe-cic specializations and extensions. We demonstrate its exibility by deriving implementations for core facilities ofCORBA, RMI, and MPI. The performance results showthat the derived implementations equal or exceed the per-formance of corresponding native versions. These resultssuggest that customizing middleware on a per-applicationbasis is an eective approach for building robust, high-performance applications.1 IntroductionCommunications middleware abstract commonproperties of an application domain and present auniform view of dierent deployment environments tothe applications, thereby simplifying application con-struction. But the middleware themselves are hardto build, because implementors must cope with thevariations in deployment environments, as well as thediering functionality and optimization expectationsof dierent applications. This paper introduces a sim-plied way to build middleware using Quarterware, acomponent architecture for middleware, together witha kit of components that complements it.This approach has many signicant advantages overconventional approaches. First, the Quarterware archi-tecture provides the same advantages to a middlewareimplementation that a middleware provides to appli-cations: it abstracts common properties among dier-ent middleware, and provides a uniform view