Adaptable architectural middleware for programming-in-the-small-and-many

Abstract

A recent emergence of small, resource-constrained, and highly-mobile computing platforms presents numerous new challenges for software developers. We refer to development in this new setting as programming-in-the-small-and-many (Prism). This paper provides a description and evaluation of a middleware intended to support software architecture-based development in the Prism setting. The middleware, called Prism-MW, provides highly efficient and scalable implementation-level support for the key aspects of Prism application architectures. Additionally, Prism-MW is easily extensible to support different application requirements suitable for the Prism setting. Prism-MW is accompanied with design, analysis, deployment, and run-time monitoring tool support. It has been applied in a number of applications and used as an educational tool in a graduate-level embedded systems course. Recently, Prism-MW has been successfully evaluated by a major industrial organization for use in one of their key distributed embedded systems. Our experience with the middleware indicates that the principles of architecture-based software development can be successfully, and flexibly, applied in the Prism setting. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003.