Efficiently Building On‐line Tools for Distributed Heterogeneous Environments

Software development is getting more and more complex, especially within distributed middleware‐based environments. A major drawback during the overall software development process is the lack of on‐line tools, i.e. tools applied as soon as there is a running prototype of an application. The MIMO MIddleware MOnitor provides a solution to this problem by implementing a framework for an efficient development of on‐line tools. This paper presents a methodology for developing on‐line tools with MIMO. As an example scenario, we choose a distributed medical image reconstruction application, which represents a test case with high performance requirements. Our distributed, CORBA‐based application is instrumented for being observed with MIMO and related tools. Additionally, load balancing mechanisms are integrated for further performance improvements. As a result, we obtain an integrated tool environment for observing and steering the image reconstruction application. By using our rapid tool development process, the integration of on‐line tools shows to be very convenient and enables an efficient tool deployment.