Simple, weakly-coupled, invisible middleware (SWIM)

One of the operational goals of a middleware platform is to provide a mechanism of distributing computation requests in a way that hides from the programmer the complexity of the underlying systems platform. This means that distribution mechanisms used to harness a set of computer and network resources should not expose to the programmer the detailed systems aspects which are unrelated to their application. Ideally, the programmer should be left to concentrate on the functionality of his/her application without having to be concerned with how the distribution is achieved or how the resources are used. However, this is not true today: programmers need to be aware of details of the middleware in use and are constrained by it in the design of their application, e.g. API constraints. We present a proof-of-concept demonstration of a middleware platform that imposes absolutely no constraints on the programmer apart form those used in the programming language itself. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with a prototype implementation in Java, running on a cluster of 20 nodes with a performance comparison with XML-RPC and Java-RMI.