Experiences with an object-oriented architecture for developing dynamically extensible distributed system management software

Developing extensible, robust, and efficient distributed applications is a complex task. In order to help alleviate this complexity, we have developed the ADAPTIVE Service eXecutive (ASX) framework. ASX is an object-oriented framework composed of automated tools and reusable C++ components that simplify the development, configuration, and reconfiguration of distributed applications in a heterogeneous environment. These applications may be configured dynamically to contain multiple network services that execute concurrently in one or more processes or threads. Components in the ASX framework have been ported to UNIX and Windows NT and are currently being used in a number of large-scale production distributed systems. This paper describes our experience gained using the ASX framework to build a highly modular reusable and extensible software architecture for a family of distributed system management applications.