Addressing Challenges of Distributed Systems Using Active Components

摘要

The importance of distributed applications is constantly rising due to technological trends such as the widespread usage of smart phones and the increasing internetworking of all kinds of devices. In addition to classical application scenarios with a rather static structure these trends push forward dynamic settings, in which service providers may continuously vanish and newly appear. In this paper categories of distributed applications are identified and analyzed with respect to their most important development challenges. In order to tackle these problems already on a conceptual level the active component paradigm is proposed, bringing together ideas from agents, services and components using a common conceptual perspective. It is highlighted how active components help addressing the initially posed challenges by presenting an example of an implemented application.