Constructing Flexible Application Servers with Off-the-Shelf Middleware Services Integration Framework

Abstract

With the ever increasing complexity and scale of application server and the emergence of reliable OTS middleware service components, more and more application server vendors are inclined to reuse OTS middleware services in the construction of the application server. However, in conventional OTS middleware service integration, flexibility is sacrificed by hard coding concrete OTS middleware services. This paper proposes CAC (Contract, Adapter, and Configuration), a framework to integrate OTS middleware services in a flexible way. The evaluations show that our framework effectively reduces the cost of application server maintenance and OTS products customization.

The research was sponsored by the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2002CB312003, the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60603038, 60503029, and the National High-Tech Research and Development Plan of China under Grant No.2007AA01Z133, No.2006AA01Z156, No. 2006AA01Z189.