A component framework for communication in distributed applications

The development of communications services for distributed applications that are both well-structured (layered) and efficient can be difficult. This paper presents a C++ framework which promotes the development of reusable components that can be combined to implement communications services. These flexible services can be built without incurring an unacceptable performance cost. The basic abstractions in the framework are presented, followed by a discussion of more specific services for unstructured binary messages. Then, the performance impact of the framework is analyzed using a simple test application. The framework is shown to have a minimal overhead that is independent of message size.