CAREER: Principles and Techniques for Automated Middleware Specializations in Distributed Systems

标准化的通用中间件仍然是开发性能敏感和安全关键的分布式系统的一个有吸引力的选择，因为它们支持简化分布式计算的常用功能。 然而，这些中间件的功能丰富性和粗粒度设计通常会对应用程序的内存占用和性能产生不利影响。 专有的解决方案和手工优化标准化的中间件是不可行的，由于高开发和维护成本。 这项研究通过通用中间件的自动化专业化来解决这些问题（即，修剪不需要的特征，以及添加和定制必要的特征）。 本研究的学术价值在于如何通过以下方式实现自动化专业化：（a）识别和利用中间件的代数结构，该结构有助于将专业化问题映射为面向功能的软件开发问题;（B）发展一种新的理论，用于跨应用程序生命周期阶段的功能组合、重构和交互;以及（c）基于生成式编程开发定义明确的专业化流程。 CAREER研究的更广泛的影响是通过（a）开发新的原则来设计中间件，使它们内在地服从于专业化;（B）专业化模式的文档，这减少了软件维护;（c）提高了开发人员的生产力和系统的正确性;以及（d）通过一个名为伽马的开源工具套件，将研究成果转移到教育和科学界（中间件架构操作的生成方面）。

Standardized general-purpose middleware remain an attractive option to develop performance-sensitive and safety-critical distributed systems due to their support for commonly required features that simplify distributed computing. The feature-richness of these middleware and coarse-grained design, however, often adversely impact memory footprint and performance of the applications. Proprietary solutions and handcrafted optimizations to standardized middleware are infeasible due to high development and maintenance costs. This research is addressing these problems via automated specialization of general-purpose middleware (i.e., pruning unwanted features, and adding and customizing the necessary ones). The intellectual merit of this research lies in how the automated specializations are realized by (a) identifying and exploiting the algebraic structure of middleware that helps map the specialization problem into a feature-oriented software development problem; (b) developing a new theory for feature composition, refactoring, and interactions across the lifecycle stages of applications; and (c) developing a well-defined specialization process based on generative programming. The broader impact of this CAREER research is observed through the (a) development of new principles to design middleware that make them inherently amenable to specialization; (b) documentation of specialization patterns, which reduces software maintenance; (c) enhanced developer productivity and system correctness; and (d) transitioning of the research artifacts to education and scientific community through an open source tool suite called GAMMA (Generative Aspects for the Manipulation of Middleware Architectures).