The Remote Deployment Service is a unique feature brought by ScalAgent. This service, activated inside the middleware process, controls the downloading, installation, instantiation and activation of the components. The unique feature is that this service is a part of a global automated process that deploys a distributed application made of components and described as an assembly of components. This global process handles failures, disconnections, anticipated activation, ... through each individual remote deployment service.
Moreover, this service supports also the redeployment process, which consists in stopping, reinstalling, and resuming the application and the global reconfiguration process, which consists of globally changing part or the entire application dynamically, i.e. without stoppping the complete application. All those processes are handled by the remote deployment service in a distributed, safe, secure and reliable way.
The Mediation Suite software entities are Components that can run on any remote node hosting a mediation server process. Resulting from past research and developments efforts at INRIA, the component model is perfectly suited to the messaging model used for remote communications. This model provides for the JAVA developer runtime features such as remote communication, on-disk persistency, automatic recovery, atomic execution and also a true component-based programming model with real separation between the component core implementation task and the application-specific component assembling task.
The Mediation Framework is at the heart of the ScalAgent technology. It provides a set of software components which collects, process and deliver the data from devices to information systems. The framework is composed of Java components that can be deployed and executed on any mediation servers anywhere on the network.
The Software Development Kit gives access to developers to the Mediation framework programming concepts and API. The SDK enables customizing the mediation framework, either by enriching an framework, or by creating a new framework dedicated to your specific application domain. The SDK requires avaerage Java programming skills.
Those tools are used to configure the mediation framework. They help visualize the components as boxes and enable to define how they communicate, where they execute, what properties has to be set when the mediation is running. They also control the global deployment of all the components throughout the network on the various mediation servers.
The Reliable Messaging Middleware is a true Java distributed and configurable Message Oriented Middleware. This middleware provides asynchronous, reliable communication channels between JAVA processes hosted on any machines, connected with various network techniques and topology. Data exchanged is garanteed to be delivered and data format are up to the developper. The middleware is developped in Java, with version running on Java Standard Environmment (J2SE), on OSGi embedded environment, on various embeded Java virtual Machines and even on Javacard. Various Internet network protocols are supported for the middleware communication : TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, HTTP with proxy, HTTPs, PPP, ...
