Self-managing remote object interconnections

The interconnection of remote objects in a heterogeneous network environment like the Internet is typically achieved by employing object-oriented middleware (OOM) approaches like CORBA or Java RMI. While they offer various options to configure and to adjust the actual binding process, they typically lack features for self-managing the configuration, e.g. selecting the proper protocol settings for establishing a TCP link. Moreover, the corresponding applications are typically limited to the communication features of the selected middleware approach and can not seamlessly adopt another one without being modified and recompiled. In this paper, we present a new object communication approach supporting the self-management of object interconnections. It relies on an integration middleware called Remote Method Streaming which is able to dynamically customize an object interconnection across different OOM and without affecting a running application. In addition, the actual self-managing features can be implemented independent of the current application and communication approach, respectively. The paper describes the conceptual details of our approach, the related implementation in Java and finally illustrates its application