The Importance of Resource Management in Engineering Distributed Objects

Middleware technologies such as CORBA and DCOM have been developed as a means of tackling heterogeneity and complexity problems inherent in distributed systems. However, more work still need to be done to develop methodologies for the construction of distributed objects. In addition, little attention has been paid to the development of methodologies for the configuration of computational resources among distributed objects. This paper introduces a resource configuration description language (RCDL) for the specification of the resource management of distributed systems. This language is based on both a resource model and a task model. The former offers various levels of abstraction for resources, resource factories and resource mangers. The latter then provides a fine- and a coarse-grained approach to allocate resources to both application services and middleware services by breaking such services into task hierarchies. Finally, we use reflection as a principled means to obtain a clear separation of concerns between the functional and nonfunctional behaviour (e.g. resource management) of distributed systems.

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