Applying reflective middleware techniques to optimize a QoS-enabled CORBA component model implementation

Although existing CORBA specifications, such as Real-time CORBA and CORBA Messaging, address many end-to-end quality of service (QoS) properties, they do not define strategies for configuring these properties into applications flexibly, transparently, and adaptively. Therefore, application developers must make these configuration decisions manually and explicitly which is tedious, error-prone, and often suboptimal. Although the recently adopted CORBA Component Model (CCM) does define a standard configuration framework for packaging and deploying software components, conventional CCM implementations focus on functionality rather than adaptive quality of service, which makes them unsuitable for next generation applications with demanding QoS requirements. The paper presents three contributions to the study of middleware for QoS-enabled component based applications. It outlines reflective middleware techniques designed to adaptively: (1) select optimal communication mechanisms; (2) manage QoS properties of CORBA components in their containers; and (3) (re)configure selected component executors dynamically. Based on our ongoing research on CORBA and the CCM, we believe the application of reflective techniques to component middleware will provide a dynamically adaptive and (re)configurable framework for COTS software that is well-suited for the QoS demands of next generation applications.