RexMidas: A Reflective Middleware for Transparently and Effectively Distributing Objects on a Grid System

Developing distributed applications for the Grid is a difficult task, since several concerns intertwine within them and hence must be coped with simultaneously. Moreover, when deploying application classes, several needs should be considered, such as their characteristics, user preferences, and runtime conditions of available hosts. RexMidas is a framework that automatically transforms a centralised Java application into a distributed, possibly Grid-enabled, version. RexMidas' support for remote allocation of, and communication among, class instances, is transparent, in that original application classes need not be modified (or available) at the source level. For remote allocation RexMidas adopts policies that try to strike a balance between choosing capable hosts, equipped with the necessary libraries, and minimising the overhead of communication between remote objects.