Automatic Connection of Components for Dynamic Distributed Applications

Self-management, self-connection and selfconfiguration capabilities are emerging as important requirements for a generation of large-scale, highly dynamic, distributed applications. We propose a new solution to manage the connection of the components in a distributed application automatically. Each component in the distributed application is equipped with an autonomous connection unit (ACU). The ACU will allocate to its corresponding component an address consisting of an IP address and a port number. This address of the component will be delivered by the ACU to remote components, so that the remote components could communicate with the local component. In addition, the ACU could start up the component software module autonomously according to user settings. This solution is a generic model which could be adapted to many distributed applications. It has been successfully applied to a distributed online judge system for a campus contest in Donghua University.