Infrastructure for Deployment of Heterogeneous Component-based Applications

Deployment is a process which involves all actions performed with an application after it is released. Traditionally, deployment has been addressed for each component model separately (if at all), even though most of the concepts are the same. The Deployment and Configuration of Component-based Applications Specification released by OMG proposes a unified approach that can be tailored to different component models. This thesis focuses on the execution phases of the deployment process. It presents a generic deployment runtime based on the OMG specification. The main objective is to elaborate support for multiple component models and subsequently support for heterogeneous applications consisting of components implemented in different component models. This has been achieved through a system of extensions which allows isolating component model specifics from the runtime. Even though the OMG specification was not originally intended to support heterogeneous applications, the implementation deviates from it only in a few points. In all such cases, the thesis presents an analysis of the situation and rationale for the deviation