DeXteR: an extensible framework for declarative parameter passing in distributed object systems

• Authors: Sriram Gopal;Wesley Tansey;Gokulnath C. Kannan;Eli Tilevich
• Venue: Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Conference on Middleware
• Year: 2008

In modern distributed object systems, reference parameters are passed to a remote method based on their runtime type. We argue that such type-based parameter passing is limiting with respect to expressiveness, readability, and maintainability, and that parameter passing semantics should be decoupled from parameter types. We present declarative parameter passing, an approach that fully decouples parameter passing semantics from parameter types in distributed object systems. In addition, we describe DeXteR, an extensible framework for transforming a type-based remote parameter passing model to a declaration-based model transparently. Our framework leverages aspect-oriented and generative programming techniques to enable adding new remote parameter passing semantics, without requiring detailed understanding of the underlying middleware implementation. Our approach is applicable to both application and library code and incurs negligible performance overhead. We validate the expressive power of our framework by adding several non-trivial remote parameter passing semantics (i.e., copy-restore, lazy, streaming) to Java RMI.