An Advanced Communication Toolkit for implementing the Broker pattern

The Broker pattern is a powerful solution when building middleware communication systems. Existing toolkits, such as BAST, GTS, and ACE, although useful, are insufficient to implement the Broker pattern architecture. These systems concentrate on wrappers for communication protocols, and on implementing auxiliary communication patterns, but address only some aspects of object communication. In this work we demonstrate how the Broker pattern can be easily implemented by using an Advanced Communication Toolkit (ACT). ACT model defines four layers according to the increasing degree of abstraction of exchanged information. The resulting systems are highly customizable, extensible, portable, and can communicate at any of the four layers independently. ACT supports various high-level communication protocols (e.g., HTTP, IIOP, SMTP) and can be used to implement Broker-based systems such as OMG CORBA, Java RMI, or Microsoft DCOM