Sponsor
This work was partially supported by DARPA/ITO under the Information Technology Expeditions, Ubiquitous Computing, Quorum, and PCES programs, by NSF Grant CCR-9988440 and by Intel.
Published In
Proceedings of the 2001 International Workshop on Multimedia Middleware
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
10-2001
Subjects
Middleware, Adaptive computing sytems, Multimedia systems
Abstract
Middleware, from the earliest RPC systems to recent Object-Oriented Remote Message Sending (RMS) systems such as Java RMI and CORBA, claims transparency as one of its main attributes. Coulouris et al. define transparency as “the concealment from the … application programmer of the separation of components in a distributed system.” They go on to identify eight different kinds of transparency.
We considered titling this paper “Transparency Considered Harmful”, but that title is misleading because it implies that all kinds of transparency are bad. This is not our view. Rather, we believe that the choice of which transparencies should be offered by a middleware platform is critically dependent on the use to be made of that platform. Specifically, we argue that network transparency and concurrency transparency are inappropriate for middleware that is designed to support multimedia applications. This is because a network that is “transparent” is a network that is hidden, and thus one whose Quality of Service aspects are also hidden.
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/10630
Citation Details
"Reifying Communication at the Application Level," Andrew Black, Jie Huang and Jonathan Walpole, In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Multimedia Middleware, Ottawa, Canada, October 2001. Also availabile as OGI Technical Report CSE-01-006, June 2001.
Description
A Position Paper submitted to the International Workshop on Multimedia Middleware, Ottawa, October 2001, and published in its proceedings. Available at http://dl.acm.org/. DOI: 10.1145/985135.985146. ©2001 ACM