An Extensible Binding Framework for Component-Based Middleware

One of the most significant limitations of current middleware platforms, both commercial and research, is that they typically support only a small, pre-defined, set of fundamental binding types (e.g., remote method invocation). This restriction limits the scope of platforms in that they cannot easily accommodate, or easily be extended to accommodate, richer or more specialised forms of interaction (e.g. events, media streaming, multicast, and many others discussed in the paper). This paper describes a highly extensible, component-oriented framework for the definition and implementation of such binding types. We motivate and specify the framework in detail and evaluate it by providing examples of its use.