Towards architecture-level middleware-enabled exception handling of component-based systems

Exception handling is a practical and important way to improve the availability and reliability of a component-based system. The classical code-level exception handling approach is usually applied to the inside of a component, while some exceptions can only or properly be handled outside of the components. In this paper, we propose a middleware-enabled approach for exception handling at architecture level. Developers specify what exceptions should be handled and how to handle them with the support of middleware in an exception handling model, which is complementary to software architecture of the target system. This model will be interpreted at runtime by a middleware-enabled exception handling framework, which is responsible for catching and handling the specified exceptions mainly based on the common mechanisms provided by the middleware. The approach is demonstrated in JEE application servers and benchmarks.