An Approach to Flexible Application Composition in a Diverse Software Landscape

With the escalating complexity, aggregation, and integration of software in enterprise, mobile, and pervasive arenas, it becomes increasingly difficult to compose, deploy, and operate applications that span a distributed and diverse software landscape. Furthermore, the increasing aggregation of software artifacts, including platforms, frameworks, components, services, and tools, lack a standard metadata description capability that hinders rapid and flexible distribution, deployment, and operation. This paper presents a general approach, realized with the FAST Framework, to improving the development, deployment, and operation of distributed applications that consist of diverse software artifacts. Application specification and composition is based on configuration queries that flexibly combine modules and a container that nonintrusively manages module lifecycles. The results show benefits with regard to simplified configurability, enhanced reuse via XML-based description propagation, improved distributed-application-provisioning intervals vs. local configurations, as well as applicability to Grid, Web Services, and MDA.