Unified Object Bus: Providing Support for Dynamic Management of Heterogeneous Components

Existing middleware implementations successfully address hardware and operating system heterogeneity. However, they are built assuming a single component model type (e.g. CORBA, DCOM or JavaBeans). We claim that such assumption is not necessarily desirable in certain ubiquitous computing scenarios where services implemented as components of different middleware platforms can coexist. We present in this paper the Unified Object Bus (UOB), a flexible middleware platform for component-based systems that allows integrating heterogeneous component models while preserving a common interface to manipulate the lifecycle of their associated components. The UOB provides functionality to manage components both locally and remotely, and constitutes one of the backbone technologies to enable Active Spaces, which support mobile users in an unobtrusive ubiquitous computing environment that couples models and virtual representations to the physical world.