A Generative Component Infrastructure for Embedded Systems

Component infrastructures such as Enterprise JavaBeans [27], Micorosoft’s COM+ [14] and the upcoming CORBA Components [17] have become the de-facto standard for enterprise applications. Reasons for this success are the clean separation of technical and functional concerns, COTS containers (applications servers), and the resulting well-defined programming model and standardization. It is desirable to have these same benefits for embedded application development. However, application servers as they are today cannot be deployed on embedded devices because of the limited resources regarding computing power, memory, etc. on the device. This paper proposes an approach to implement component infrastructures for embedded devices, using a family of codegenerated containers. The paper motivates the problem, gives general guidelines for design and implementation of such infrastructures and describeds a prototype implementation. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: The introduction in section 1 briefly describes embedded software development stateof-the-art and outlines some problems with this approach. Section 2 describes the solution proposed in this paper in a general fashion. The prototype implementation is descrbed in section 3, including the concrete motivation for its implementation. Section 4 describes related work done by other people, while section 5 describes how we will proceed with our work.