Reconfiguration of Resources in Middleware

The monolithic nature of current middleware platforms is unable to deal with the demands of emerging technologies such as multimedia and mobile computing. In addition, these platforms are sometimes too complex for applications with few resources. There have been some attempts to introduce more flexibility, however, middleware nowadays does not address configuration and reconfiguration issues in a generic and principled way. We believe that reflection provides a principled means to obtain the flexibility and adaptation required. Thus, a reflective middleware architecture is introduced. The main focus of this paper regards the configuration and reconfiguration of resources in middleware. A task model is used to specify the initial configuration of resources allocated to critical middleware services. Hence, time constrained services like video stream communication have their resources encapsulated and isolated to have a better control of them. Reconfiguration of resources may be then achieved by the conjunction of both the reflective facilities of the middleware platform and a consistent resource model at various levels of abstractions. 1