Course Proposal

Distributed Communications Systems Architecture

Harold Carr, Ph.D.

Purpose

This course teaches an architectural framework for building distributed communications systems.

Detail

Distributed communications systems (DCS) get reinvented every N years. Examples are DCE, DCOM, CORBA and SOAP. This course teaches an architecture for DCS which supports the above concrete instances. The prominent elements of the architecture are Presentation (the data types available to the programming model), Encoding (how the data types are represented on-the-wire), Protocol (how the data is "framed" for transmission) and Transport (how the framed/encoded data is moved from one location to another).

Method

The course will consist of lectures and programming assignments. The lectures will teach the DCS architecture the entire course duration. Lectures will also cover specified systems such as CORBA and SOAP. The programming assignments will be:

  1. Build a CORBA client and server.
  2. Build a SOAP client and server.
  3. Write a CORBA or SOAP client using the DCS architecture which communicates with both #1 and #2 transparently to the programming model. This is done by "plugging in" alternate protocol and encoding modules while maintaining a constant presentation and transport modules.
  4. (time permitting): Modify client #3 talk SOAP over BEEP (I'll supply the server side part of this work).
Not covered

The lectures will show how security and transactions fit into the framework but the programming assignments will not involve these features.

Note: this course does not teach web service nor CORBA programming. It teaches the underlying architecture of such systems.

Related work

This course teaches a framework for building distributed communications systems. It is related to (but sits conceptually above) frameworks for building network and application protocols.

Motivation