Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware
During the summer of 2006 I recieved a Nuffield Fundation grant to work on the school’s middleware system, RAFDA. I was responsible for making the system interoperable with .NET and Apache Axis Web Services, and played a small part in the creation of a technical report, titled, Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware.
The report’s abstract:
We believe that to fully support adaptive distributed applications, middleware must itself be adaptable, adaptive and policy-free. In this paper we present a new language-independent adaptable and adaptive policy framework suitable for integration in a wide variety of middleware systems. This framework facilitates the construction of adaptive distributed applications. The framework addresses adaptability through its ability to represent a wide range of specific middleware policies. Adaptiveness is supported by a rich contextual model, through which an application programmer may control precisely how policies should be selected for any particular interaction with the middleware. A contextual pattern mechanism facilitates the succinct expression of both coarse- and fine-grain policy contexts. Policies may be specified and altered dynamically, and may themselves take account of dynamic conditions. The framework contains no hard-wired policies; instead, all policies can be configured.