**** Columbia Network Research Group Seminar ****

Title:    An approach to the provision of configurable and reconfigurable middleware.
Speaker:  Prof. Geoff Coulson
          Lancaster University/Columbia University
When:     Tuesday, March 27, 10 am
Where:    Interschool Lab, CEPSR Building, 7th floor
          Columbia University

It is becoming well established that object-based middleware platforms
(e.g., CORBA, DCOM, Java RMI) must accommodate an increasingly diverse
range of requirements which arise from the needs of both applications
and underlying systems.  Moreover, it is clear that to achieve this
accommodation, platforms must be capable of both deployment-time
configurability and run-time reconfigurability.  This talk describes a
middleware platform that addresses these needs.  The platform is built
on a well-founded lightweight component model, uses reflective
techniques to facilitate (re)configuration, and employs the notion of
component frameworks to constrain the scope of dynamic reconfiguration
operations.  Importantly, the platform also aims to achieve a level of
standards conformance (e.g., with CORBA and COM) and, crucially, high
performance.  Despite its novel architecture and high degree of
configurability, the platform performs on a par with standard commercial
CORBA ORBs.