Contractual Message Passing

Team. As a future goal in computing and possibly CABOOSE systems, we present a paradigm for Contractual Message Passing (CMP). Most modern high-level languages provide a mechanism for dynamic invocation of behavior. As such, one can create a data structure which not only stores information but also provides mechanism for delivering the results of the actions within the public interface of stored objects. Consider a hashtable which stores performance contracts for constructing an object or invoking an object's method. In terms of the JAVA Virtual Machine (JVM), the object which one constructs or method of an object that one invokes must have a class definition accessible by the byte-code interpreter. Such behavioral maps might exists on a pair or more nodes in a network structure. These action dictionaries for object construction and method invocation would hold the contracts whose properties consist of a fully qualified class name, a collection of actual parameters, plus a list of formal parameter types. These "contract objects" could be exchanged within a network of virtual machines using serialization. Upon producing a result on the servicer node using a behavioral map, the requestor would be sent a result acknowledgement. Each service node could contain a directory of publicly accessible class definitions providing sub-services for the node and interface definitions for each method of each class. This would reduce the source code coupling found in large web-services such as JAX-WS. Remember a contract is simply an agreement been portions of a system. Computing contracts include the common requests and agreements also found in their business counterparts for performance, delivery, timeliness and etcetera. Passing contractual messages is nothing new since the equivalent behavior occurs in modern computing; however, this approach might be more compact.

Have a Marvelous Week of Hunting, Pecking, and Thinking. The CABOOSE Team.