Eureka - A Resource Discovery Service for Component Deployment

Component orientation is a current trend for creating modern applications. The concept of a component is broad and includes plugins and other units of modularization. Typically, components exhibit dependencies on other components or resources; any such dependencies are requirements needed for the component to function. As a consequence, deploying a component requires deploying the transitive closure of all dependencies. This paper describes a project, called Eureka, that simplifies this process by creating a resource discovery service to locate required component resources when deploying a component. The target implementation environment is the Open Services Gateway Initiative framework, but the concepts and issues are applicable to general component resource discovery. The approach is based on Apple's Rendezvous.