An architecture for extensible middleware platforms

This article presents a middleware platform architecture whose goals, motiv ated by the needs of a real-world application, are the following: separatio n of functional and non-functional code in applications, composition of non -functional properties, and modularity and extensibility of the middleware platform itself. This architecture is inspired by the Enterprise Java Beans platform, and uses a new object composition model to separate and compose the non-functional properties. In order to evaluate this architecture, we h ave implemented the JavaPod platform which we have used to implement a prot otype of the application that motivated our goals. The results of these exp eriments show that our goals can indeed be achieved with our architecture. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.