The Computer Science Colloquium

Alexander Totok
(IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)

"Towards Efficient And Manageable Component-Based Internet Services"

Component-based development eases programming effort and allows for separation of concerns, code reuse, and application evolution, but has negative implications on application performance, efficiency, and manageability. The structural complexity of applications and underlying middleware, together with client behaviors exhibiting complex data access patterns, make it difficult to provision, manage, and optimize performance of component-based Internet services.

This talk will describe several techniques that attempt to alleviate this situation, in the context of J2EE applications. The techniques range from automatic (i.e., performed by the middleware in real time) to manual (i.e., involve the programmer or the service provider) and) span the three phases of an application's lifecycle: (1) structuring) and development, (2) configuration and deployment, and (3) runtime management and optimization.

I will first present the Reward-Driven Request Prioritization (RDRP) mechanism, which preferentially allocates bottleneck server resources to incoming client requests in order to boost service revenues and provide better QoS to clients that bring more profit to the service. Second, I will talk about application design rules and optimizations, which enable efficient usage-driven distribution of component-based applications in wide-area environments. Finally, I will present ongoing work at IBM Research aiming at facilitation of deployment and configuration management of complex J2EE applications in heterogeneous and constrained environments.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Netlogic, Inc.