Type-safe dynamic protocol composition in Jgroup/ARM
Hein Meling, Alberto Montresor · 2009
Protocol composition is a common approach to structure protocols used by networked applications, and typically a vertically layered approach is taken. This paper presents an alternative approach, where the protocol composition is a weakly-coupled set of protocol modules organized in a non-hierarchical structure. Protocol modules are dynamically constructed at runtime. The approach is designed for sys-tems that involves multiple communicating entities and mul-ticast style interactions are supported, making the approach suitable for building reliable network applications. The main advantage of the approach is type-safety and that modules in the same composition communicate by direct interaction, whereas other frameworks typically use a vertically layered protocol stack, forcing all messages/events to pass through all intermediate layers introducing unnecessary delays.