CIAO - Component-Integrated ACE ORB

Component middleware is gaining popularity in the past few year as it addresses several limitations of object-oriented middleware by defining a higher leverl of abstraction. Through this abstraction, component model defines exactly the virtual boundary of a component and how a component advertise how it interacts with other components/clients. Component middleware also defines the supporting runtime environment, packaging and deployment mechanisms and standards. All these mechanisms and standards make reusing software component much easier.

Using component middleware, systems can be developed thruough "assembly" instead of the conventional "engineering" approach. We can, therefore, distinguish the software developers' roles in a system's lifecycle. These roles include:

• Component Designer: They define the capability of components by defining the interfaces they expose to/depend on other components.
• Component Implementer: They provide the actual implementations based on the component defintions defined by component designers.
• Component Packager: They package component and their default properties into software packages.
• Component Assembler: They define how a system can be composed by selecting components implementations from component repositories and connect them together declaratively to form a system.
• System Deployer: They determine how system assemblies should be deployed, e.g., the distribution of component servers that consisting a system.

CIAO is currently aiming to provide component-oriented paradigm to the distributed, real-time, embedded (DRE) system developers by abstracting DRE-critical systemic aspects, such as QoS requirements, RT policies, as installable/configurable units supported by the component framework. Promoting these DRE-critical aspects as first-class metadata disentangles code for controlling these non-function aspects from application logic and makes DRE system development more flexible. Since mechanisms to support various DRE-critical non-functional aspects can be easily verified, CIAO will also make configuring and managing these aspects easier.

CIAO Architecture

CIAO will be the default platform-specific model supported by CoSMIC which is a set of tools for supporting model-integrated computing (MIC) and OMG's Model-Drivern Architecture (MDA). As many of the non-functional aspects can be configured and "programmed" by specifying them in the component composition metadata (or, "component assembly descriptors" in CCM nomenclature,) it allows CoSMIC to realize the non-functional aspects of an application easily and correctly without worrying about verifying the correctness of synthesized code that managed multiple DRE-critical aspects.

The combination of CoSMIC and CIAO will offer the next-generation software development paradigm.

CIAO Related Info

• CIAO related information in Chinese prepared by the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Science.
• CIAO current status and releasenotes
• CIAO document title page
• Browse the lastest CIAO source
• KSU CCM Workshop, May, 2003.
• 2003 RT-CCM Meeting
• 2002 CIAO Project Kickoff Meeting

CCM and QoS realted OMG documents:

• Latest CCM specification: CORBA Components RTF 1.1
• Lightweight CCM - (draft RFP)
• QoS for CORBA Components - (Request for Proposal draft, RFP presentation slides).
• UML profile for CORBA Components: Initial submission
• Stream for CORBA Components - (Request for Proposal draft, RFP presentation slides).
• Deployment and Configuration - (Joint Revised Submission
• UML profile for QoS and FT - (Submission 1, Submission 2)

Various component middleware related Info

• General Information on CCM and component models:
  • Diego Sevilla Ruiz's CCM Page: The most comprehensive collection of information about CCM.
  • Workshop on Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) - CBSE7, CBSE6, CBSE5 report, CBSE4, CBSE3, CBSE2, CBSE1
  • Workshop on Component-Oriented Programming (WCOP) 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997 , 1996.
  • A collection of Component-Oriented Programming Bibliography.
• Other QoS-enabled CCM projects
  • MoQoS project by T-Systems, Technical University of Berlin and Fraunhofer FOKUS.
  • Tom Ritter's QoS-enabled Distributed Object (Qeds) (which is part of the previous MoQoS project.)
• Other QoS-enabled component-oriented projects
  • Angelo's QoSBeans Resource Page
  • Richard Staehli's, QoSBeans Project page.
  • The QuA project of Simula Research Laboratory.
• Other QoS and Middleware Related Info:
  • Workshop on QoS in Distributed Object System (QoSDOS) 2001 2000
  • Distributed Multimedia Object/Component Systems ( DMMOS'2001)
  • Thomas Ledoux's research on Reflective Middleware and AOP.
  • AspectIX Project is a research project on QoS-aware Object-Oriented Middleware from the Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.
• Other Component-related Research
  • Another CIAO project by DSTC and Component Software Research Group.
• Meta-programming, reflection and AOP:
  • The AOSD Workshop on Aspects, Components, and Patterns for Infrastructure Software ( 2002, 2003).
  • The Open Distributed System of the Distributed Multimedia Research Group.
  • Karl J. Lieberherr and their research on Demeter: ASOD.
  • Matthias Radestock's research: Coordination in Adaptive Open Distributed Systems
  • Walter Cazzola's mChaRM (a shorter paper.)
• Modeling QoS:
  • Responses to OMG's Modeling Quality of Service and Fault Tolerance Characteristics and Mechanisms: Joint submission by I-Logix, Thales, and Tri-Pacific and submission by Open-IT.
• Model-Driven Architecture and related research:
  • The Model-Integrated Computing research by ISIS.
  • CoSMIC by CDOC at ISIS is a toolset for synthesizing CCM applications that demand strigent QoS requirements.
  • Cadena by KSU is a integrated environment for building and modeling CCM systems that incoporate non-functional supports such as real-time, quality-of-service, and distrubution. Cadena supports CIAO as one of its target CCM implementations. Here is the Cadena document describing how to setup your environment and Cadena to generate CIAO component implementations and assemblies.
• Other unrelated CIAO/CCM:
  • CCM Motorcycles.
  • CCM Airline.
  • Genuine Piaggio CIAO directly from Italy.
  • Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office: Judging from the name, they seem to be working on some sort of QoS problem also. ;-)
  • The CIAO Prolog Development System: Check them out, they offer some CIAO components too (not compatible to our CIAO components. ;-)

Nanbor Wang, <nanbor at cse wustl edu>
Last modified 10:56:16 CDT May 27 2004
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