Thread Transparency in Information Flow Middleware
Middleware '01 Proceedings of the IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms Heidelberg
Thread transparency in information flow middleware
Software—Practice & Experience - Special issue: Middleware
Reifying communication at the application level
M3W Proceedings of the 2001 international workshop on Multimedia middleware
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Building distributed multimedia applications is complicated. These applications transfer huge amounts of data with Quality of Service requirements. Popular communication middleware such as Java RMI and CORBA does not support such applications very well because they focus on distributed information flow rather than request/response interactions. We propose Infopipes, a new abstraction for transferring information through the Internet, to facilitate the design and construction of such applications. In the Infopipe framework, information flow is the heart of a system. Building an information flow system is as simple as connecting together predefined component Infopipes such as sources, sinks, buffers, pumps, filters, and pipes. Infopipes are compositional; the properties of the whole pipeline follow from the properties of its components. We also propose a simple but effective polarity system to model the activity and passivity of Infopipes. We have implemented an Infopipe prototype in Squeak.