Component-based programming and application management with Olan

Abstract

Efficient system mechanisms for distributed object management are becoming increasingly available. Application developers need appropriate tools to fully exploit the power of these facilities. A distributed application is conveniently viewed as a set of components, some of which are developed specifically, while others are legacy applications, encapsulated within components. While engineering issues for the development of individual components are reasonably understood, many research issues are open in the management of software configurations made up of a number of distributed components. In this paper, we introduce a component-based programming model supported by a module interconnection language for large scale distributed application development and administration. The contribution of the Olan model is to separate the interconnection requirements of the application from the implementation and from the constraints of the underlying architecture. The flexibility of this model is well suited to large scale application requirements in terms of components distribution and dynamic evolution. As a first experiment, we have developed a teleconferencing application, whose description highlights the advantages of our approach.