Designing a Distributed Application Middleware by Using Windows Communication Foundation

Abstract

When software system infrastructure consists of more than one client, sharing a common data and messages starts to be one of the most wanted features of the applications. This research concentrates on data distribution between software systems in a sheet metal machines. The main objective is to design and implement a distributed application middleware for the sheet metal industry environment by using a Windows Communication Foundation.

This work proceeds on by first analyzing the nature of the distributed systems by investigating the principles, different architectures and main characteristics of the distributed systems. At next this thesis covers the Windows Communication Foundation programming framework that is used to build distributed applications in a Windows platform. We study the message exchange patterns and communication methods provided by this framework and take a look to the programming model to design and implement distributed services. In a practical part of this thesis we familiarize to the design and implementation of the application middleware. We cover the network topology model where the designed system will work. We introduce the communication and message exchange models of the designed middleware and present the most fundamental parts of the middleware logic. In the last section we cover the results which discuss about the work done and analyze the tests that were executed in a simple configuration that simulated distributed system network in a Windows platform.

The conclusion of this work demonstrates that the main objectives of this study were met and the outcome was a prototype of the distributed application middleware. We conclude that principles of the distributed systems and Windows Communication Foundation framework can be adapted to the design of software systems for the sheet metal machines. However additional research work is needed to conclude which are the software components and modules to be used in a complete distributed application middleware.