Abstract

In order to achieve the goals of a next generation servicebased Internet, we need to provide high performance, high capacity, secure and reliable services that can be rapidly scaled and managed. The ability to manage and share information on large-scale network resources with a growing number of users in a secure and efficient manner is desirable. Distributed systems allow services, endsystems and protocols to dynamically attach to and detach from the distributed environment. In turn it is desirable that these services are able to operate in a safe, concurrent manner while possibly sharing common resources; that is to say they are composable. The development of flexible, scalable and customizable directory services can be used as an enabling technology for the development of next generation composable middleware frameworks. In this paper we use an object-based access control framework as an example of a directory-enabled middleware architecture and discuss some of the tradeoffs involved in obtaining consistent information from the directory in an efficient manner. We also discuss implementation and performance issues pertaining to the directory service, in the context of a composable, middleware framework (CompOSE|Q) being developed at the University of California, Irvine. 1

Citations