Experiences in Lightweight Event Relaying Framework Design

In software development there is always the need for faster development process. One way to speed up the process is to reuse existing components, in which loose coupling of the components is an important prerequisite. Publish/subscribe is one popular way to provide loose coupling, and there exists many middleware solutions for it. However, most such solutions are aimed for large inter-device networks, and are poorly suited for resource-constrained low-level contexts. As our solution we present the design of SERF, a novel lightweight software framework implementing pub/sub event messaging and peer-to-peer architectures. We also describe the experiences and lessons learned that led to the development of the framework. Upon analysis we find out that SERF offers the advantages of loosely coupled modules and pub/sub, but also point out that the framework is less suitable outside its framed problem area.