A lightweight awareness service for industrial environments [distributed software]

Presents the design and implementation of a lightweight awareness service and its application to example scenarios of distributed software environments. Due to the complexity of distributed systems, the behavior of software for distributed systems is hard to predict. Even examining the behavior of existing software is difficult, due to the lack of central control and state. Awareness denotes the ability of a (distributed) system to report about and to assess its own status and behavior. Awareness is helpful for important steps of the distributed software engineering process, e.g. for gathering state information, for online observation, for debugging and for performance management of each development cycle. The basic purpose of the lightweight awareness service is to visualize online information in powerful, flexible presentation views. To be useful for industrial environments, the awareness service is designed to be easy-to-use: it is a fully distribution-transparent client/server architecture which does not require manual configuration. This is achieved by the introduction two new concepts: (1) a view request broker that is responsible for launching, locating and binding views to clients, and (2) the concept of auto-configuring views, i.e. views that adapt their outline automatically to the data being presented. Both concepts can be accessed as ready-to-use components via a simple object-based procedural client interface.