Application Development and Management in The Programmers' Playground
- T. Paul McCartney,
E.F. Berkley Shands,
Kenneth J. Goldman,
William M. Shapiro
Application management refers to the process of making software
applications available to end-users and providing automated mechanisms
for launching and joining such applications. The Programmers'
Playground is a computing environment for creating distributed
applications from modular, reusable components. This paper discusses
a set of tools that enable application developers to: (1) design and
debug Playground distributed applications from existing
"off-the-shelf" components using a visual configuration tool, (2) make
new application components available on the Internet through a
"launcher" service, and (3) make complete distributed applications
available via a World Wide Web interface, enabling end-users to launch
and join the applications interactively. Our system automates the
tasks involved in launching distributed applications. This system is
completely general-purpose; no programming is required to customize it
for particular applications.
KEYWORDS:
distributed computing, distributed debugging, resource allocation,
visual configuration, World Wide Web
Available as
postscript (.ps) or
compressed postscript (.ps.gz).
Washington University Department of Computer Science WUCS-98-18,
June 1998.
Submitted to Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.
Prepared by
T. Paul McCartney
(paul@cs.wustl.edu)
Washington University Department of Computer Science