An Architectural Description Language for Enterprise Computing

Architectural description languages (ADLs) are used to specify high-level, compositional view of a software application. ADLs usually come equipped with a rigourous state-transition style semantics, facilitating specification and analysis of distributed and event-based systems. However, enterprise system architectures built upon newer middleware (implementations of Java’s EJB specification, or Microsoft’s COM+/ .NET) require additional expressive power from an ADL. The TrustME ADL is designed to meet this need. In this paper, we describe several aspects of TrustME that facilitate specification and anlysis of middleware-based architectures for the enterprise.

A novel data replication and management protocol for mobile computing systems

Mobile computing has enabled users to seamlessly access databases even when they are on the move. Mobile computing environments require data management approaches that are able to provide complete and highly available access to shared data at any time from any where. In this paper, we propose a novel replicated data protocol for achieving such goal. The proposed scheme replicates data synchronously over stationary sites based on three dimensional grid structure while objects in mobile sites are asynchronously replicated based on commonly visited sites for each user. This combination allows the proposed protocol to operate with less than full connectivity, to easily adapt to changes in group membership and not require all sites to agree to update data objects at any given time, thus giving the technique flexibility in mobile environments. The proposed replication technique is compared with a baseline replication technique and shown to exhibit high availability, fault tolerance and minimal access times of the data and services, which are very important in an environment with low-quality communication links.