[ObjectWeb Middleware] -> [Our Technical Vision]

ObjectWeb's Technical Vision

Our Long-Term Vision

The ObjectWeb Consortium has been established to build a comprehensive set of open source middleware technologies. Its main technical goal is to define and implement a component-based, efficient and scalable middleware architecture which can be easily configured and adapted to different application domains. Targeted systems may range from small objects of nomadic computing to large application servers for electronic commerce.

As stated above, "comprehensive" means that ObjectWeb middleware is intended to cover the major functions one has come to expect of industrial-strength distributed platforms such as OMG's CORBA, Sun's Java platforms (e.g. J2EE), or Microsoft's .Net, including, for instance, support for remote invocation, distributed transaction processing, asynchronous messaging, event notification, persistence, distributed system management, active directories, service discovery and trading, load-balancing and clustering, etc.

"Comprehensive" also means that ObjectWeb middleware technologies are not intended for one market niche only, e.g. Web application servers. Instead, they should support the construction of a variety of distributed middleware platforms, addressing the needs of such diverse market segments as mobile telecom services, transportation and manufacturing systems, home automation environments, etc.

Our Technical Strategy

To achieve this goal, ObjectWeb relies on the development of a consistent, component-based system architecture. This means the following:

• components in the code base should provide the basis for a continuum of configuration options, from the static assembly of custom-built middleware platforms to the dynamic, on-line reconfiguration of a middleware platform by the very applications it supports
• the code base itself should be architected according to well-defined software frameworks that embody recurrent architectural patterns for middleware construction, and that facilitate its extension, adaptation and customization
• the middleware functions embodied in the code base are themselves built in accordance to architectural patterns and frameworks, and as structured assemblies of software components

The component-based design relies on :

• a software component model supported by a common set of tools to describe, assemble and manipulate software architectures, and to generate and configure proxy compilers, interceptors, join points, meta-objects, probes, etc
• a middleware "exo-kernel" avoiding pre-supposed functionalities, and yet providing frameworks for recurring issues, such as naming, communications, resource management, distributed configuration management, failure detection, monitoring, logging, etc

This architecture permits the development of modular components falling into 2 major layers :

• pattern-based distributed services (persistency, service discovery, replication, notification, etc)
• platforms (OpenCCM, JonAS, ProActive, Enhydra, etc) conceived as "personnalities" that use the above basic services

The Fractal project embodies ObjectWeb's current vision of its reference component model.