Co-ordination adaptors: the evolution of component-based distributed systems

• Authors: Phyo Kyaw;Cornelia Boldyreff;Jie Xu
• Venue: Systems engineering for business process change
• Year: 2002

In analysing the evolution of distributed systems, the scale of the components has increased, the requirements for different domains have become complex and a variety of different distributed component models have emerged. As traditional components turn into distributed enterprise components, there is no clear distinction between distributed objects, models, and functionality of the existing components. Many modern distributed component models provide facilities for developing new distributed systems by merging functionality and distributed components with their own communication protocols. In this paper, we analyse and discuss the architectural and implementation problems with modern distributed systems. We provide a model that allows software engineers to develop and integrate new and existing legacy components by separating concerns of the components and co-ordination. We have identified different services of the system by distinguishing between functional services, distributed services and internal services. We have also introduced the use of explicit co-ordination components, which serves as a bridge between functional services and modern distributed middleware models. In this way software engineers can design and implement more flexible, scaleable and independent components based on different services. We believe that our model can simplify implementation of distributed systems as well as serving as a bridge between modern ORBs and many legacy components.