Distributed Communication

Abstract

When looking at distributed communication in the context of software develop- ment, it is important to focus on two different aspects: the abstractions and the integration mechanisms.

An abstraction for distributed communication is a middleware-neutral and platform-independent model that describes a solution for distributed commu- nication. In this model, distributed communication is perceived as a separated concern that can be dealt in isolation from other concerns as, for instance, repli- cation or concurrency.

Each abstraction is characterized by different properties, for instance expres- sive power and modularity. Expressive power property determines the ability to model the different variations of distributed communication. Modularity prop- erty defines how the description of distributed communication can be isolated from other concerns such as replication and functionality issues. These properties determine its feasibility to be accepted by programmers of distributed applica- tions. So, a distributed communication abstraction should be evaluated in terms of these properties.

An integration mechanism is an implementation tool that integrates code. In- tegration mechanisms can be classified in terms of their properties, for instance, compile-time integration versus run-time integration. Code generation and re- flection are two common examples of integration mechanisms. There has been an intensive research on integration mechanism, for instance, aspect-oriented programming.

An abstraction can have several implementations. The implementation should consider which integration mechanism will be used.