Eureka – A Resource Discovery Service for Component Deployment

Abstract

Component orientation is a current trend for creating modern applications. The concept of a component is broad and includes plugins and other units of modularization. Typically, components exhibit dependencies on other components or resources; any such dependencies are requirements needed for the component to function. As a consequence, deploying a component requires deploying the transitive closure of all dependencies. This paper describes a project, called Eureka, that simplifies this process by creating a resource discovery service to locate required component resources when deploying a component. The target environment is the Open Services Gateway Initiative framework, but the concepts and issues are applicable to general component resource discovery. The approach is based on Rendezvous from Apple Computer, Inc.