Dynamic Adaptive Marshalling: A Dynamic Solution to Middleware Heterogeneity

Abstract

A main problem for enterprise systems communication based on a client/server model is the likelihood of the end-points (client and server) being based on a heterogeneous infrastructure. In such cases, there is a need to convert session and transport information from the format pertaining to the source of the request to that of the target. The usual approach of implementing point-to-point connections that translate a source format to a target one is laborious, costly and inflexible since the bridges have to be handcrafted for each situation. To address this problem, in previous work we have described the architecture of a generic dynamic adaptor TUBE (The Ubiquitous Broker Environment), which intends to effect dynamic protocol-level systems integration by at run time bridging the gap between the disparate formats presented by a heterogeneous infrastructure. This paper discusses one of the central components of the system, the Dynamic Adaptive Marshaller (DAM), which is responsible for converting data between different formats at run-time. All marshalling is performed dynamically, so the DAM must "dynamically adapt” to encode or de-code the desired format, involving presentation, session and transport layer operations.