Non-functional Replication Management in the Corba Component Model

Component-based programming is a promising approach to distributed application development [1]. It encourages software reuse and promotes the separation (as in aspect-oriented programming[5]) between the components' business implementations and the code managing the used system services. One system service of particular importance to the distributed computing domain is replication. Managing replication as a separate (non-functional) aspect in a component-based environment is a way to provide a generic replication solution which can be applied to a wide range of applications. It allows the association of different replication/consistency protocols with components according to their contexts of (re)use. If many projects have addressed the issue of managing replication in contemp orary middleware (and more specifically in CORBA [3][6][9]), providing configurable replication management in a component-based environment is still an open issue. This paper presents our approach to component replication, based on the CORBA Component Model (CCM [8]). We show that replication can be managed as a configurable non-functional aspect in a component-based system. The article is organized as follows. Section 2 presents our motivations and Section 3 provides a rapid overview of CCM. Our infrastructure for replication and consistency configuration, as well as its application to a specific scenario, are presented in Section 4. Sections 5 concludes this article.