HADAS: A Network-Centric Framework for Interoperability Programming

Abstract

The explosive growth in global networking infrastructures has created the opportunity to construct systems involving large number of independent and widely-distributed computational components. Administrative and operational autonomy considerations imply that the actual establishment of agreements regarding all aspects of component interaction must be explicitly declared and effectively formed. Moreover, since agreements may evolve over time, their representation needs to be highly tailorable. Design autonomy considerations imply the need to interoperate between pre-existing components, yet not enforce a fixed interoperability standard. The HADAS system addresses both concerns by providing a model and a corresponding programmable interface to component interoperability. Specifically, it provides an integration framework in which components "live", a peer-based configuration model for forming agreements and interconnections between components, and a coordination language for explicitly programming the actual desired distributed computation using these components. The framework rests on an underlying reflective object model that supports mutability and mobility, and an infrastructure that provides object interconnectivity, security and persistence. HADAS is fully implemented in Java and comes with a full programming environment for developing and executing network-centric applications.