Diploma Thesis, TU-Vienna, 2008

Extensible virtual shared memory or abbreviated XVSM is a middleware specification that follows the space based computing paradigm which solves the coordination, transportation and other problems introduced by the collaboration of independent software processes. This thesis discusses the features of XVSM, compares them to other standards and technologies like JavaSpaces, CORBA and CORSO and introduces a Java language binding. The main focus is directed at the before mentioned language binding and this topic is divided into three parts: The design decisions and goals, a detailed description of the implementation and practical examples and performance evaluations of example code.

 

A language binding which serves as an application programming interface of such a new system as XVSM is a difficult but interesting task. One of the main challenges is the specification which is changing a lot between versions and requires the API to be very flexible so that these changes can be incorporated quickly and without breaking any existing software that was written for an older version.

 

Another major point of consideration is the language integration; the language binding is designed to extend already existing classes and interfaces wherever possible to minimize the learning time for new programmers because they can rely that the methods behave as described in the well known base classes.

 

This also shows results for performance tests of two example applications. Runtime and lines of code needed for the examples are measured and compared to results of applications solving the same problem written in JavaSpaces, CORBA and CORSO; The results indicate that the new language binding is competitive in both performance and lines of code.