Closer to the edge

The next generation of distributed systems will be loosely-coupled systems that: support incremental and independent development, and are tolerant of interface changes; can systematically deal with impedance mismatches; and work well in dynamically changing realtime situations; and can scale in complexity while delivering the required real-time performance. Popular architectural styles, including data flow architecture, event driven architecture and service-oriented architecture, can be regarded as special cases, by the appropriate assignment of roles and choice of quality of service in the interfaces between components. Data-oriented application architecture coupled with an appropriate standards based messaging software bus such as DDS can cut down the complexity of the integration problem from O(N*N) to O(N), while preserving loose-coupling and ensuring scalability. Having readily available middleware infrastructure bridges for popular application platform components can greatly boost productivity and the pace of integration.