Design and implementation of a composable reflective middleware framework

With the evolution of the global information infrastructure, service providers will need to provide effective and adaptive resource management mechanisms that can serve more concurrent clients and deal with applications that exhibit quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Flexible, scalable and customizable middleware can be used as an enabling technology for next-generation systems that adhere to the QoS requirements of applications that execute in highly dynamic distributed environments. To enable application-aware resource management, we are developing a customizable and composable middleware framework called CompOSE|Q (Composable Open Software Environment with QoS), based on a reflective meta-model. In this paper, we describe the architecture and runtime environment for CompOSE|Q and briefly assess the performance overhead of the additional flexibility. We also illustrate how flexible communication mechanisms can be supported efficiently in the CompOSE|Q framework.