Chapter 5: Distributed Systems Patterns


In today’s connected world, enterprise applications increasingly run distributed across multiple servers, connect to remote data sources and Web services, and are accessible over the Internet. Distributed computing is powerful, but it is not without challenges. Networks are inherently unreliable, and communicating with remote servers is slow when compared to local interprocess communication. In addition, running a program simultaneously across multiple computers can introduce a host of concurrency and synchronization issues.

Instance-Based vs. Service-Based Collaboration

Distributed computing can be based on two distinct architectural styles, according to Business Component Factory [Herzum00]:

  • Instance-based collaboration

  • Service-based collaboration

Instance-based collaboration extends the model of object-oriented computing across network boundaries. A component can instantiate remote object instances, pass references to these remote objects around, invoke methods on the remote objects, and de-allocate them. The advantage of this approach is that the same object-oriented programming model used inside the application applies to the distributed components. Most runtime platforms incorporate support for instance-based collaboration so that a developer has to make no (or few) special provisions to access a remote object versus a local object. This simplifies developing a distributed solution tremendously, often to the point where previously co-located objects can be distributed during deployment time without requiring any code changes to the application. Instance-based collaboration also gives the consumer of a remote object fine-grained control over the lifetime of the remote object, allowing more efficient usage of remote resources.

The ease-of-use of instance-based collaboration, however, comes at the expense of a complex interaction model and tight coupling between consumer and provider. Instance-based interaction requires a specific instance of a remote object to be addressable over the network, introducing the complexities of lifetime and instance management into the communications protocol. For this reason, most platforms that support instance-based collaboration do not provide interoperability with other platforms.

Service-based collaboration addresses some of these challenges by exposing only a “manager-like” or “coordinator-like” interface to potential consumers. Consumers can invoke a method on this interface but they do not have lifetime control over any remote objects This simplifies the interaction tremendously and enables the use of standard protocols that support interoperability across platforms.

However, service-based collaborations do not provide the continuity of using an object-oriented programming model for both local and remote objects. This means that you have to track the state of a conversation between objects explicitly, something you did not have to worry about when using instance-based collaboration. Also, while standards-based protocols improve interoperability, they require the application to convert application-internal data types into a common format that is understood by each communicating endpoint, which may involve additional transformation logic.




Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft. NET 2003
Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft. NET 2003
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 107

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