Harold J. Batteram

The friends platform — A software platform for advanced services and applications

New high-speed networks provide new opportunities for service providers to offer advanced voice, data, and multimedia services. This paper describes an extendible framework for the efficient creation and deployment of services. The framework integrates the needs of service providers, service developers, and end users within a single coherent architecture. In this architecture, services are composed of distributed software components. The framework provides the infrastructure for component interaction and encourages reuse of service logic from a rich set of basic components. This paper describes details of both the infrastructure and the components that implement the reusable service logic. The application of the service framework is illustrated by a case study of a multi-party service for collaborative work in project teams. The integration of the service framework and the Lucent Softswitch is a promising direction for future research.

Design and evaluation of the distributed software component framework for distributed communication architectures

We present our experiences with the DSC (Distributed Software Component) framework and development environment. The DSC framework supports component oriented distributed communication architecture such as TINA (Telecommunications Information Network Architecture). Within the component development environment, components can be developed and evaluated. Software components are self-contained packages of code that can be dynamically linked into a program. Operational interfaces cater for the external functionality of the component. The DSC can support both dynamic and static operational interfaces. Also, there can exist multiple instances of the same operational interface. Furthermore, components can be grouped together to form compound components. Through a common control and configuration interface the components can be configured with regard to events, properties, operational interfaces life cycle, and composition. We apply this framework to a TINA based service and network architecture called MESH (Multimedia Services an the Electronic Super Highway). An example is provided; a shared white board service is created using the DSC framework. The shared white board service can be used in multimedia conferencing applications.

Design and Implementation of a Framework for Monitoring Distributed Component Interactions

This paper presents a framework for monitoring component interactions. It is part of a larger component framework built on top of the CORBA distributed processing environment that supports development and testing of distributed software applications. The proposed framework considers an OMG IDL specification as a contract for distributed interactions and allows precise monitoring of interaction activities between application components. The developer is not burdened with monitoring issues because all the necessary code instrumentation is done automatically. The tester is given the opportunity to use monitoring facilities for observing interactions between distributed component applications. This paper explains the monitoring framework and reasons about its expressive power, accuracy and applicability. The approach is validated in a platform for design, development and deployment of on-line services.

Design and implementation of the MESH services platform

Industry acceptance of TINA (telecommunications information networking architecture) will depend heavily on both the evaluation of working systems that implement this architecture, and on the experiences obtained during the design and implementation of these systems. During the MESH (Multimedia services on the Electronic Super Highway) project, a TINA-based platform for networked multimedia services has been developed and evaluated. This platform, referred to as the MESH platform, implements major parts of the TINA service architecture version 5.0 and the TINA network architecture version 3.0. In addition, several demonstration services such as multiparty high-quality audioconferencing and videoconferencing, shared database access and subscription management services have been created. To support the design and implementation of the MESH platform a DSC (distributed software component) framework has been developed. This framework is a generalization and implementation of the TINA computational object model and can also be applied outside the TINA domain. The DSC framework acts as a middleware layer, which shields component designers from many communication level details. A DSC can be mapped to a computational object or object group. DSC can be grouped to form compound components from sub-components that also can consist of multiple components, etc. In addition, the DSC framework addresses flexible configuration, dynamic component construction from (downloadable) sub-components, and dynamic interface instantiation. The MESH platform not only demonstrates the potential of TINA, but also reveals several weak areas. This paper describes the DSC approach, which we used to design and implement major parts of TINA, and our experiences with TINA.

Rapid service development on a TINA-based service deployment platform

This paper reports on the experiences with the development of services on a TINA-based service deployment platform. Within the MESH (Multimedia services on the electronic super highway) project, such a platform is developed based on TINA service architecture 5.0. Various services have been developed on top of this platform using a distributed software component framework that integrates the TINA service components. Our main experience is that the TINA architecture enables rapid service development by providing generic service components that can be easily extended with service-specific functionality.

A test framework for CORBA∗ component model-based software systems

In this paper we present a framework for testing software systems that is based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA∗) component model (CCM) standard. An important aspect of CCM-based systems is that they must be verifiable and testable at the abstract level of their design, regardless of the language chosen to implement the component. Component-based systems allow the development and testing of components to be divided among development groups working in parallel. However, dependencies between separately developed components may cause delays in testing. The test framework we present allows for the automatic generation—based on their external specification—of reactor components that testers can use as substitutes for components their components depend on, but that have not yet been developed. The test components generated can respond to an invocation interactively or automatically by means of a test script. The framework can also visualize interactions between components as they flow through a distributed system, and can compare runtime interactions with design specifications. The approach to testing that we describe was first explored in the distributed software component (DSC) framework developed as part of the FRIENDS project, and has been used successfully in the WINMAN European research project, which deals with network management applications. The test framework has now been extended and adapted for the CCM architecture. It is currently implemented as part of the COACH research project, which is sponsored by the European Commission.