Abstract
Interoperability remains a significant challenge in today’s distributed systems; it is necessary to quickly compose and connect (often at runtime) previously developed and deployed systems in order to build more complex systems of systems. However, such systems are characterized by heterogeneity at both the application and middleware-level, where application differences are seen in terms of incompatible interface signatures and data content, and at the middleware level in terms of heterogeneous communication protocols. Consider a Flickr client implemented upon the XML-RPC protocol being composed with Picasa’s Service; here, the Flickr and Picasa APIs differ significantly, and the underlying communication protocols are different. A number of ad-hoc solutions exist to resolve differences at either distinct level, e.g., data translation technologies, service choreography tools, or protocol bridges; however, we argue that middleware solutions to interoperability should support developers in addressing these challenges using a unified framework. For this purpose we present the Starlink framework, which allows an interoperability solution to be specified using domain specific languages that are then used to generate the necessary executable software to enable runtime interoperability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Starlink using an application case-study and show that it successfully resolves combined application and middleware heterogeneity.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Soap2corba and corba2soap, http://soap2corba.sourceforge.net/
Bromberg, Y.-D., Grace, P., Réveillère, L.: Starlink: runtime interoperability between heterogeneous middleware protocols. In: The 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Minneapolis, MN, USA (June 2011)
Bromberg, Y.-D., Issarny, V.: INDISS: Interoperable Discovery System for Networked Services. In: Alonso, G. (ed.) Middleware 2005. LNCS, vol. 3790, pp. 164–183. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Caballero, J., Yin, H., Liang, Z., Song, D.: Polyglot: automatic extraction of protocol message format using dynamic binary analysis. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2007, pp. 317–329. ACM, New York (2007)
Daconta, M., Obrst, L., Smith, K.: The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services and Knowledge Management. Wiley, Indianapolis (2003)
Duftler, M., Mukhi, N., Slominski, S., Weerawarana, S.: Web services invocation framework (wsif). In: OOPSLA Workshop on Object Oriented Web Services (2001)
Grace, P., Blair, G., Samuel, S.: A reflective framework for discovery and interaction in heterogeneous mobile environments. ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review 9(1), 2–14 (2005)
Object Management Group. Model driven architecture (mda), document number ormsc/2001-07-01. Technical report (2001)
Gutierrez-Nolasco, S., Venkatasubramanian, N.: A Reflective Middleware Framework for Communication in Dynamic Environments. In: Meersman, R., et al. (eds.) CoopIS 2002, DOA 2002, and ODBASE 2002. LNCS, vol. 2519, pp. 791–808. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Howar, F., Jonsson, B., Merten, M., Steffen, B., Cassel, S.: On Handling Data in Automata Learning - Considerations from the Connect Perspective. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds.) ISoLA 2010, Part II. LNCS, vol. 6416, pp. 221–235. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
IBM. Websphere message broker, www.ibm.com/websphere/wbimessagebroker
IONA. Artix esb (2007), http://www.iona.com/products/artix/
Kongdenfha, W., Motahari-Nezhad, H., Benatallah, B., Casati, F., Saint-Paul, R.: Mismatch patterns and adaptation aspects: A foundation for rapid development of web service adapters. IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 2, 94–107 (2009)
Kumar, R., Nelvagal, S., Marcus, S.: A discrete event systems approach for protocol conversion. Discrete Event Dynamic Systems 7, 295–315 (1997)
Limam, N., Ziembicki, J., Ahmed, R., Iraqi, Y., Li, D., Boutaba, R., Cuervo, F.: Osda: Open service discovery architecture for efficient cross-domain service provisioning. Computer Communications 30(3), 546–563 (2007)
Nakazawa, J., Tokuda, H., Edwards, W., Ramachandran, U.: A bridging framework for universal interoperability in pervasive systems. In: 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2006 (2006)
Peltz, C.: Web services orchestration and choreography. IEEE Computer 36(10), 46–52 (2003)
Ramdhany, R., Grace, P., Coulson, G., Hutchison, D.: MANETKit: Supporting the Dynamic Deployment and Reconfiguration of Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols. In: Bacon, J.M., Cooper, B.F. (eds.) Middleware 2009. LNCS, vol. 5896, pp. 1–20. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Roman, M., Kon, F., Campbell, R.: Reflective middleware: From your desk to your hand. IEEE Distributed Systems Online 2(5) (August 2001)
Spalazzese, R., Inverardi, P., Issarny, V.: Towards a formalization of mediating connectors for on the fly interoperability. In: The IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture and European Conference on Software Architecture (2010)
Vinoski, S.: It’s just a mapping problem [computer application adaptation]. IEEE Internet Computing 7(3), 88–90 (2003)
Yellin, D., Strom, R.: Protocol specifications and component adaptors. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 19, 292–333 (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bromberg, YD., Grace, P., Réveillère, L., Blair, G.S. (2011). Bridging the Interoperability Gap: Overcoming Combined Application and Middleware Heterogeneity. In: Kon, F., Kermarrec, AM. (eds) Middleware 2011. Middleware 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7049. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25821-3_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25821-3_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25820-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25821-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)