The design of a configurable, extensible and dynamic notification service

ABSTRACT

Publish/subscribe infrastructures, specifically notification servers, are used in a large spectrum of distributed applications as their basic communication and integration infrastructure. With their recent popularization, notification servers are being developed to support specific application domains. At the same time, general-purpose notification servers provide a large set of functionality for a broad set of applications. With so many options, developers face the dilemma of choosing between application-specific or general-purpose notification servers. In both cases, however, the set of features provided by the servers are usually neither extensible nor configurable, making their customization to specific application domains a difficult task. In this work, a more flexible approach is proposed - a customizable, extensible and dynamic architecture for notification services - which allows the customization of the notification service to different application domains. The extensi-bility model is presented according to the design framework proposed by Rosemblum and Wolf. A preliminary implementation of the prototype is also discussed, as well as configuration examples.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.12 Interoperability
            Subjects: Distributed objects

  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Information browsers

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
dynamic architecture, event-based middleware, notification servers, pluggable architecture