Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Spontaneous Container Services

2003; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-540-45070-2_3

1611-3349

Andrei Popovici, Gustavo Alonso, Thomas R. Gross,

Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services

Container technology (e.g., Enterprise Java Beans) was designed for fixed network applications. This is unfortunate, because the ability of containers to adapt components transparently (e.g., with persistence and transactions) would be of great advantage in mobile computing. In this paper, we generalize the container model into a new software architecture, the spontaneous container. A spontaneous container allows to homogeneously extend all applications of a network, even if they spontaneously join or leave the network. In the paper we show how to build a spontaneous container by unifying different technologies into one coherent architecture: (i) dynamic aspect-oriented programming, (ii) containers, and (iii) infrastructures for mobile computing. Dynamic aspect-orientation makes a spontaneous container much more flexible than existing commercial containers. Inheriting the container programming model allows a single focus point for modifications for all applications in a network. Basing the overall architecture on dynamic service brokerage and discovery allows a seamless integration with existing infrastructures for both mobile and fixed computing. Following these ideas, we have built and evaluated a spontaneous container prototype that effectively and efficiently transforms applications within a network into a distributed system capable of transactional interaction, access control, and orthogonal persistence.