Due to the shift from software-as-a-product (SaaP) to software-as-a-service (SaaS), software components that were developed to run in a single address space must increasingly be accessed remotely across the network. Distribution middleware is frequently used to facilitate this transition. Yet a range of middleware platforms exist, and there are few existing guidelines to help the programmer choose an appropriate middleware platform to achieve desired goals for performance, expressiveness, and reliability. To address this limitation, in this paper we describe a case study of transitioning an Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) service from local to remote access. Our case study compares five remote versions of this service, constructed using different distribution middleware platforms. These platforms are implemented by widely-used commercial technologies or have been proposed as improvements on the state of the art. In particular, we implemented a service-oriented version of our o...
Young-Woo Kwon, Eli Tilevich, William R. Cook