A style-aware architectural middleware for resource-constrained, distributed systems

A recent emergence of small, resource-constrained, and highly mobile computing platforms presents numerous new challenges for software developers. We refer to development in this new setting as programming-in-the-small-and-many (Prism). This paper provides a description and evaluation of Prism-MW, a middleware platform intended to support software architecture-based development in the Prism setting. Prism-MW provides efficient and scalable implementation-level support for the key aspects of Prism application architectures, including their architectural styles. Additionally, Prism-MW is extensible to support different application requirements suitable for the Prism setting. Prism-MW has been applied in a number of applications and used as an educational tool in graduate-level software architecture and embedded systems courses. Recently, Prism-MW has been successfully evaluated by a major industrial organization for use in one of their key distributed embedded systems. Our experience with the middleware indicates that the principles of architecture-based software development can be successfully, and flexibly, applied in the Prism setting.