DistGear: A Lightweight Event-Driven Framework for Developing Distributed Applications

The emergence of cloud computing makes it easier for enterprises and individual users to obtain distributed computing resources. At the same time, developing distributed systems is still complex and difficult. In order to reduce the complexity in distributed application development, a series of techniques such as RPC, message-oriented middleware have been proposed and widely used. These techniques hide the underlying communicating details but require developers to take control of coordination among different machines for complex distributed tasks. This paper proposes a lightweight event-driven framework called DistGear to simplify the development of complex task processing in distributed applications. DistGear is a layer of software built on top of communication facilities for providing developers with a programming abstraction to easily handle distributed tasks and control machine coordination in tasks. We implement DistGear based on coroutines and message communication. Experience with DistGear in a simplified real-world system suggests it is effective. Performance evaluation also demonstrates DistGear's good concurrency and low resources consumption.