The Proteus Multiprotocol Message Library

Grid systems span manifold organizations and application domains. Because this diverse environment inevitably engenders multiple protocols, interoperability mechanisms are crucial to seamless, pervasive access. This paper presents the design, rationale, and implementation of the Proteus multiprotocol library for integrating multiple message protocols, such as SOAP and JMS, within one system. Proteus decouples application code from protocol code at run-time, allowing clients to incorporate separately developed protocols without recompiling or halting. Through generic serialization, which separates the transfer syntax from the message type, protocols can also be added independently of serialization routines. We also show performance-enhancing mechanisms for Grid services that examine metadata, but pass actual data through opaquely (such as adapters). The interface provided to protocol implementors is general enough to support protocols as disparate as our current implementations: SOAP, JMS, and binary. Proteus is written in C++; a Java port is planned.