Addressing the middleware configuration challenges using model-based techniques.

Component middleware, such as J2EE, .Net and CORBA Component Model (CCM) have been increasingly used to develop and deploy large-scale distributed systems in different domains, including defense, enterprise, avionics and industrial process control. The different applications in each of these domains require different levels and types of quality of service (QoS) guarantees from their underlying component middleware. In an effort to support a large number of applications, therefore, component middleware developers provide enormous flexibility in the way the middleware can be configured and fine-tuned for the target application. Application developers, however, resort to ad hoc techniques to configure the middleware, which are tedious and errorprone.This paper describes a novel scheme we are using based on model-based systems engineering to address the concerns of complex middleware configuration. We present a modeling paradigm called Options Configuration Modeling Language (OCML) we have used in the context of conflguring a QoS-enabled CORBA component middleware.