International Business Machines Corporation

Michael Cheng

Tom Zhongyu Zhou

Leigh Allen Williamson

Brian Ward Thomson

Vishwanath Venkataramappa

Ian Robinson

Robert Howard High, Jr

James Irwin Knutson

Russell Ley Newcombe

Stephen James Cocks

Simon Christopher Nash

Kim Lawson Rochat

Tim Scott Hanson

A system and method for using a declarative approach to enforce instance based security in a distributed environment is presented. The invention described herein includes security logic in declarative specifications that, in turn, decouples the security logic from distributed object administration logic. An access manager identifies access requirements by combining object name property keys included in a distributed object with property key specifications included in a declarative specification. In turn, the access manager compares a caller's access attributes with the access requirements to determine whether to create a distributed object instance and allow the caller to invoke a method on the distributed object instance. The access requirements may also include role specifications and method parameter specifications.

System and method for using a declarative approach to enforce instance based security in a distributed environment

The present invention provides a method, apparatus and computer program product which enables a target service to provide operations which behave, on a per operation basis, in a way appropriate to the type of client that requested the operation to be performed. As a result the target service can provide operations which behave differently for different clients. Further the client can obtain details of the behavior characteristics of the operations, according to its type, at runtime and act appropriately in the event of the request being timed out or resulting in a communication failure. For example, the client middleware can take action to re-issue a timed out request if the behavior characteristic for that operation indicates that multiple invocations of the operation will yield the same result.

Client/server request handling

Provided is a method for programming module load balancing and failover in a distributed computing environment. The Java Management extensions (JMX) specification is enhanced to support load balancing and provide a high-availability of JMX management beans (Mbeans). Also provided are enhancements to the programming model and infrastructure to support the enhanced programming model. Two exemplary approaches for load balancing and failover are provided, one based both upon clustered Mbeans and one based upon unclustered Mbeans. In the unclustered approach, client affinity is supported in that a request from a particular client can be routed to a particular Mbean. In the clustered approach, a specific Mbean can be invoked by providing a special parameter in the Mbean invocation or by adding a special property to the specific Mbean's ObjectName to indicate that during runtime automatic routing should not be employed.

Enabling high availability and load balancing for management modules in a computing environment

Enabling high availability and load balancing for JMX Mbeans

A method, apparatus, and computer implemented instructions for binding object references from a remote name space into a local name space using a Web application. Information is collected to generate a request for an object reference. Information, such as an application server to use as the source, a source name space path, an identification of destination server, and a destination name space path to which the object reference is to be bound, may be used. The request is sent using a communications protocol, such as hypertext transfer protocol to the application server to be used as the source for the object reference. An object reference is located using the name space. The object reference may be serialized into a format, such as a common object request broker architecture format and sent to the destination. The destination will unserialize the object reference and perform binding using the destination name space path.

Legacy CORBA name space integration using web application servers

Memory management to support calls between objects in language environments support automatic garbage collection and language environments requiring explicit control of object destruction is provided. Reference counting is used to automatically control the lifetime of objects requiring explicit destruction and that are to be accessible across the language boundary. A data structure is maintained in a runtime component for each object that is accessed over a language boundary. The reference count for each non-garbage collected object is incremented by the runtime in accordance with the number of cross-language references held to it. When the count reaches zero through decrements as the references are returned and destroyed, the non-garbage collected object can be safely and automatically destroyed. The runtime creates a strong reference to any garbage collected object accessed by a cross-language call. The reference is visible to the garbage collector, and prevents the object being collected while the reference is in existence.

Memory management in a partially garbage-collected programming system

Uniform access to and interchange between objects with use in any environment that supports interface composition through interface inheritance and implementation inheritance from a common base class is provided. Proxies are used to provide both cross-language and remote access to objects. The proxies and the local implementations for objects share a common set of interface base classes, so that the interface of a proxy for an object is indistinguishable from a similar interface of the actual implementation. Each proxy is taught how to deal with call paramters that are proxies of the other kind. A roster of language identifiers is developed, and a method is added to each object implementation which, when called, checks whether it matches the language that the object implementation is written in. If so, it returns a direct pointer to the object implementation. Common client coding can then be used to deal with both same language and cross-language calls.

Growing community of inventors

Austin, TX, United States of America

Michael Cheng