An evaluation of the middleware’s impact on the performance of object oriented distributed systems

In this paper, we present a performance analysis of the response time of a client–server e-banking application running over three different enterprise middleware platforms, namely HTTPServlets, RMI and Web services with JAX-RPC. We conducted performance testing with the purpose to reveal the specific characteristics of each middleware technology and the impact that they infer on the distributed application’s performance. A server node running the three J2EE platforms was benchmarked over a wide array of intranet usage patterns. A statistical analysis of the collected data led into conclusions regarding the benefits of each middleware technology. The simulation framework can be further extended to become a testing tool able to differentiate on various service demand classes as an input in distributed applications so as to offer first-cut validated results concerning the systems’ performance.