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After the modeling phase consisting of our previously identified three
steps (see section 2) is accomplished, a detailed set of
information reflecting the generic and the specific management aspects
of the application is available. GAMOCs such as cluster,
capsule, channel or node including their
properties have been derived mainly from computational and engineering
viewpoint concepts and specified using the OMT notation. As we want
to smoothly transform this object model into an implementation in form
of a CORBA-compliant management agent (see Figure
4), it is important to have the possibility of
performing an automated transformation from the OMT notation
into the OMG Interface Definition Language (IDL).
Our experiences with CASE-tools available on the market
(StP, 1995) have shown that the automatic generation of IDL object
descriptions works quite well.
Figure 4:
Overview of the transformation process
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However, some small
syntactical modifications of the IDL output may be necessary in order
to make them pass through the IDL compiler of the CORBA toolkit
without problems. These modifications reflect the specifics of
currently available CORBA development toolkits and can be automated
through altering the grammar of the CASE-tool's code generator. It is
expected that these problems will disappear as the CORBA toolkits
become more mature.
It is now the implementor's choice to decide in
which programming language the management agent actually has to be
implemented. This depends on the available mechanisms for retrieving
the desired information from the application. After that, the IDL
object descriptions are given to the IDL compiler which generates the
implementation skeleton of the agent in a concrete programming
language through standardized language mappings. Finally, the
newly written agent code is compiled and linked; the result is a fully
CORBA-compliant management agent consisting of a set of managed
objects representing the management interfaces of a distributed
application.
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