Monitoring of Distributed Component Interactions

We have describe a generic monitoring approach that can be used to enhance the quality of distributed component software. The generality of the approach is achieved through using reflective technology, i.e. CORBA Interceptors, CORBA POA and Java 2 features. A drawback of using interceptors is the fact that their interfaces have not been standardised so far. However, the process of standardisation is ongoing and has recently resulted in an OMG Joint Revised Submission called Portable Interceptors. Although the Java 2 API enables discovery of ‘forks’ in the execution, we find it lacking functionality for the purpose of discovering synchronisation points (e.g., ‘joins’) within multithreaded components.