Overview

Abstract. Combination of component software technologies and the web technologies has brought dramatic changes in distributed systems. Traditional client-server paradigm has been replaced by web-enabled component-based multi-tier architecture paradigm. This new paradigm can benefit virtually all legacy applications from traditional enterprise applications like ERP and CRM systems to engineering applications like computational fluid dynamics and computational bio-informatics.

In this case study, we apply component software technologies and web technologies in the design and development of an Engineering Computing Portal based on a Web-Enabled Component-Based Architecture (WECBA) for simplifying the use and managing the runtime of scientific and engineering applications. In this architecture, a web portal manages user profiles and interacts with a user via Java Applets and Servlets. In the midtier of the architecture, a broker is used to locate applications and resources on the backend computation servers, manage application states, and coordinate the flow of multiple applications. Since system performance is critical for engineering applications, the broker should add as little overhead as possible to the overall system. The Engineering Computing Portal broker is implemented using lightweight high performance CORBA with a Naming service and an Event Service. The choice of CORBA is important because it enables language-independent interoperability between multiple platforms and languages. On backend host servers, a computation manager based on a lightweight high performance CORBA bridges the gap between object invocations and procedural application launches...