S.I. Ahamed (USA)
Multicasting connector, componentbased software development, distributed systems
Multicasting has growing importance due to imminent arrival of new applications, such as Collaborative document editor (CDE), Group conferencing, web casting etc., which rely on multipoint delivery. Component-based Software Development (CBSD) is maturing rapidly as the current state-of-the-art development paradigm for distributed applications. Various component models and middleware, such as COM/DCOM, CORBA, JavaBean, are competing to become the industry standard. Unfortunately, currently none of the middleware for CBSD directly provides multicasting facility. Components have to be programmed to interface with the facility in network layer, data link layer and/or transport layer. This results into two significant disadvantages. Firstly, legacy components that were not designed for multicasting must be modified. Secondly, reusability of multicasting capable components is reduced because they are tied into a particular multicasting protocol or implementation. We will present an approach, Multicasting Connector Architecture, which transparently provides multicasting capability to components and middleware. It hides all the details of lower level communication protocols so that components need not have any multicasting protocol specific implementation, thus enhances their reusability. Additionally, it significantly helps incorporating legacy components that are multicasting unaware into multicasting application integration process.
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