Using event-based translation to support dynamic protocol evolution

All systems built from distributed components involve the use of one or more protocols for inter-component communication. Whether these protocols are based on a broadly used standard or are specially designed for a particular application, they are likely to evolve. The goal of the work described her...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 408 - 417
Main Authors Ryan, N.D., Wolf, A.L.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 2004
Subjects
Application software
Computer science
Logic
Message passing
Routing protocols
Software architecture
Software engineering
Web server
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Summary:All systems built from distributed components involve the use of one or more protocols for inter-component communication. Whether these protocols are based on a broadly used standard or are specially designed for a particular application, they are likely to evolve. The goal of the work described here is to contribute techniques that can support protocol evolution. We are concerned not with how or why a protocol might evolve, or even whether that evolution is in some sense correct. Rather, our concern is with making it possible for applications to accommodate protocol changes dynamically. Our approach is based on a method for isolating the syntactic details of a protocol from the semantic concepts manipulated within components. Protocol syntax is formally specified in terms of tokens, message structures, and message sequences. Event-based translation techniques are used in a novel way to present to the application the semantic concepts embodied by these syntactic elements. We illustrate our approach by showing how it would support an HTTP 1.1 client interacting with an HTTP 1.0 server.
ISBN:9780769521633
0769521630
ISSN:0270-5257
1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE.2004.1317463