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Section: New Results

Emergent Middleware

Participants : Emil Andriescu, Valérie Issarny, Thierry Martinez.

Our previous work on emergent middleware has focused on interconnecting functionally-compatible components, i.e., components that at some high level of abstraction require and provide compatible functionalities, but are unable to interact successfully due to mismatching interfaces and behaviors. To address these differences without changing the components, mediators that systematically enforce interoperability between functionally-compatible components by mapping their interfaces and coordinating their behaviors are required [18] . Our approach for the automated synthesis of mediators is performed through interface matching, which identifies the semantic correspondence between the actions required by one component and those provided by the other, followed by the synthesis of correct-by-construction mediators. To do so, we analyze the behaviors of components so as to generate the mediator that coordinates the matched actions in a way that guarantees that the two components progress and reach their final states without errors [2] . Our contribution primarily lies in handling interoperability from the application to the middleware layer in an integrated way. The mediators we synthesize act as: (i) translators by ensuring the meaningful exchange of information between components, (ii) controllers by coordinating the behaviors of the components to ensure the absence of errors in their interaction, and (iii) middleware by enabling the interaction of components across the network so that each component receives the data it expects at the right moment and in the right format.

In our latest work, we have particularly focused on item (iii) above. We recognize that modern distributed systems and Systems of Systems (SoS) are built as a composition of existing components and services. As a result, systems communicate (either internally, locally or over networks) using protocol stacks of ever-increasing complexity whose messages need to be translated (i.e., interpreted, generated, analyzed and transformed) by third-party systems. We are particularly interested in the application of message translation to achieve protocol interoperability via protocol mediators. We observe that current approaches are unable to provide an efficient solution towards reusing message translators associated with the message formats composed in protocol stacks. Instead, developers must write ad hoc “glue-code” whenever composing two or more message translators.

Ideally, message translators may be developed by separate parties, using various technologies, while developers should be able to compose them using an easy to use mechanism. However, parsers are monolithic and tightly constructed, which often makes it impossible to combine them, knowing that combining two unambiguous grammars (corresponding to two arbitrary parsers) may result in an ambiguous grammar, and that the ambiguity detection problem for context-free grammars is undecidable in the general case.

In addition to parser composition, the data structures of the parsing output must be manually defined, integrated and harmonized with the target systems (i.e., in this case, the Mediation Engine). As far as we know, the problem of inferring the output schema (or the data type) of an arbitrary tree transformation has not yet been solved, while it is known that, in general, a transformation might not be recognizable by a schema.

Following the challenges above, in [17] , we make two major contributions to the issue of systematic message translation for modern distributed systems:

  1. Starting from the premise that “off-the-shelf” message translators for individual protocols are readily available in at least an executable form, we propose a solution for the automated composition of message translators. The solution simply requires the specification of a composition rule that is expressed using a subset of the navigational core of the W3C XML query language XPath.

  2. We provide a formal mechanism, using tree automata, which based on the aforementioned composition rule, generates an associated AST data-schema for the translator composition. This contribution enables the inference of correct data-schemas, relieving developers from the time-consuming task of defining them. On a more general note, the provided method solves the type inference problem for the substitution class of tree compositions in linear time on the size of the output. The provided inference algorithm can thus be adapted to a number of applications beyond the scope of this work, such as XML Schema inference for XSLT transformations.

The composition approach that we introduced functions as a purely “black-box” mechanism, thus allowing the use of third-party parsers and message serializers independently of the parsing algorithm they use internally, or the method by which they were implemented/generated. Our solution goes beyond the problem of translator composition by inferring AST data-schemas relative to translator compositions. This feature allows newly generated translators to be seamlessly (or even automatically) integrated with existing systems, and most notably our protocol mediation engine [2] .