Towards a Standard, Interoperable and Transparent Fault Tolerance

Abstract

Unlike the functional aspect which represents the service provided by the application, the fault tolerance, like the replication, represents a non-functional aspect. Separating these two aspects improve the applications design and maintenance. Reflection is a powerful means to separate these cross-cutting concerns. We will focus on the standard reflexive potential provided by the CORBA middleware to know if the portable request interceptors could handle fault tolerance issues. We will present our fault tolerant and components based platform, namely DAISY (Dependable Adaptative Interceptors and Serialization-based sYstem) which provides replications mechanisms in a transparent and lightweight way. Two approaches of cross-cutting separation will be identified and, finally, the conceptual limits of CORBA portable request interceptors are discussed.