JECho: Supporting Distributed High Performance Applications with Java Event Channels

This paper presents JECho, a Java-based communication infrastructure for collaborative high performance applications. JECho implements a publish/subscribe communication paradigm, permitting distributed, concurrently executing sets of components to provide interactive service to collaborating end users via event channels. JECho’s efficient implementation enables it to move events at rates higher than other Java-based event system implementations. In addition, using JECho’s eager handler concept, individual event subscribers can dynamically tailor event flows to adapt to runtime changes in component behaviors and needs, and to changes in platform resources. JECho has been used to build distributed collaborative scientific codes as well as ubiquitous applications. Its event interface and eager handler mechanism have been shown flexible and in some scenarios, critical to the successful implementations of such applications. This paper’s microbenchmarks demonstrate that, with optimizations and customizations of the runtime system and the object transport layer, TCP-based reliable group communication in Java can reach good performance levels. These benchmark results also suggest that it is viable to use JECho to build large-scale, high-performance event delivery systems. JECho’s implementation is in pure Java. Its group-cast communication layer is based on Java Sockets, and it also runs in some embedded environments that currently lack standard object serialization support.