An Approach to Distributed Component-Based Real-Time Application Software Development

Component-based software development would allow application software be largely constructed, rather than programmed. This approach would dramatically improve the productivity of software development. Although there are many reusable software packages available, the integration of the chosen parts remains to be a very difficult problem because there are many barriers of integration, including programming languages, operating systems, communication mechanism, interface, etc. In this paper, an approach to developing realtime application software based on a distributed component architecture and cross-platform and cross-language integration of these software components are presented. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) will be used in the implementation. Our distributed components will satisfy easy retrieval and integration over a heterogeneous distributed system environment. A component replication mechanism is used for providing fault-tolerance feature. Using object adapters with real-time request monitor and scheduler that are transparently generated by a distributed component integration tool, real-time and fault-tolerance features can be easily incorporated in the application software.