Providing soft real-time capabilities to business applications

Modern companies must be able to react in a timely way to changes in production and financial information since quick responses provide advantages against competition. As a matter of example, in automated trading systems a delay of 1 ms may be worth $1M. In addition, nowadays business decisions are made on the basis of increasing volumes of information, complicating the adoption of decisions on time. These requirements are common to those found in other real-time application domains. Consequently, adapting certain tools used in such domains may be a solution for business applications too. This paper draws several scenarios where middleware based solutions are justified, with particular insight on real-time behavior and control of QoS (Quality of Service) needs. More specifically, we provide certain guidelines to use OMG DDS (Data Distribution Service) as communications backbone in soft real-time business applications. DDS is a recent publish/subscribe middleware specification which provides mechanisms aimed at easing the creation of complex distributed applications such as those allowing the definition of content filters or tuning QoS parameters. Unfortunately, DDS is a complex technology so the programmers of business applications may benefit from certain guidelines that help them in the identification of the topics as well as the values for the QoS parameters provided by DDS.