Client-Side Component Caching: A Flexible Mechanism for Optimized Component Attribute Caching

Locality of referenced data is an important aspect for distributed computing. Caching is commonly employed to achieve this goal. However, when using current component-oriented middleware client application programmers have to take care of this non-functional aspect by themselves, without direct support from middleware facilities or design tools. The paper at hand describes a novel approach to disburden them from this non-trivial, error-prone task by transparently integrating caching as an orthogonal middleware service using interceptors which are preconfigured at design-time using standard UML extension mechanisms. An advanced mechanism for dynamic adaptation of the caching service to changing access characteristics is introduced in the second part.