Applying Patterns to Develop a Pluggable Protocols Framework for ORB Middleware
Douglas C. Schmidt, Carlos O’Ryan, Ossama Othman, Fred Kuhns, Jeff Parsons · 2000
To be an effective platform for performance-sensitive applications, off-the-shelf CORBA middleware must preserve the communication-layer quality of service (QoS) properties of applications end-to-end. However, the standard CORBA GIOP/IIOP interoperability protocols are not well-suited for applications with stringent message footprint size, latency, and jitter requirements. It is essential, therefore, to develop standard pluggable protocols frameworks that allow custom messaging and transport protocols to be configured flexibly and used transparently by applications. This paper provides three contributions to the study of pluggable protocols frameworks for performance-sensitive CORBA middleware. First, we outline the key design challenges faced by pluggable protocols developers. Second, we describe how we resolved these challenges by developing a pluggable protocols framework for TAO, which is our highperformance, real-time CORBA-compliant ORB. Third, we present the results of benchmar...