Comparative study and implementation methodologies for distributed applications

Abstract

Today's rapid development of Internet demands highly concurrent and distributed systems. In this context, it is interesting to note that correct protocol specifications can be derived from a given service specification of the application. The main objective of this thesis is to introduce protocol derivation and develop general methodologies for designing distributed systems. Protocol synthesis focuses on generating an error-free protocol specification automatically from a higher-level service specification and it is a very important step in the protocol development process. Petri net is a very powerful model for describing and analyzing distributed, concurrent and asynchronous systems; therefore, we use it in protocol synthesis. Furthermore, we review SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) and J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) technologies and discuss their usages in decentralized, distributed applications. This thesis gives an overview of protocol engineering background knowledge, presents several protocol synthesis methods using Petri nets, gives general methodologies of distributed system implementation and presents a distribution prototype: An example service specification is used to derive a corresponding abstract protocol specification, which is implemented with three different approaches: SOAP, Java RMI and J2EE. Finally, the performance of these different implementation approaches is compared.