Improving data-intensive EDA performance with annotation-driven laziness

• A novel architectural model for improving the efficiency of publish/subscribe middleware.
• A framework (WS-Link) that implements the model for SOA-based event-driven interactions.
• Java annotations to program the lazy strategies that guide the framework.
• An intense experimentation analysis of a complete implementation of the framework in a Grid5000-based testbed.

Event-driven programming in large scale environments is becoming a common requirement of modern distributed applications. It introduces some beneficial effects such as real-time state updates and replications, which enable new kinds of applications and efficient architectural solutions. However, these benefits could be compromised if the adopted infrastructure were not designed to ensure efficient delivery of events and related data. This paper presents an architectural model, a middleware (WS-Link) and annotation-based mechanisms to ensure high performance in delivering events carrying large attachments. We transparently decouple event notification from related data to avoid useless data-transfers. This way, while event notifications are routed in a conventional manner through an event service, data are directly and transparently transferred from publishers to subscribers. The theoretical analysis shows that we can reduce the average event delivery time by half, compared to a conventional approach requiring the full mediation of the event service. The experimental analysis confirms that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional one (both for throughput and delivery time) even though the middleware overhead, introduced by the specific adopted model, slightly reduces the expected benefits.