Intercessory Objects within Channels

Abstract

The management of interactions between components of a distributed system necessitates mechanisms for monitoring activity, and influencing behaviour, within channels binding those components. A low-level mechanism, based on intercessory objects, is considered here as a foundation for the construction of higher level management functions.The role of intercessory objects in a distributed system is discussed, with emphasis on the underlying distributed processing environment and on the structure of the channel. The presence of intercessory objects introduces additional management requirements to the system, including a need for the distributed processing environment to provide support for the configuration of these objects within the channel. Restrictions placed on this configuration by distributed processing environment implementations are discussed, as is the value of generic interfaces for the implementation of reusable intercessory objects.