Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Best practices’ Category

Data distribution is about observing a changing world. A system whose communication is based on this paradigm tends to become data-centric: it becomes more concerned with modeling the first-class concepts of its business domain and less concerned with managing second-class “who-told-whom-to-do-what” middleware concepts like queues and messages. Along the way, it enjoys the benefits of decreased coupling and improved reliability, scalability, and performance.

Read Full Post »

RTI released a new white paper today that asks (and answers) the question, “What Is Real-Time SOA?” Is it simply a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) built on faster Web services or a faster Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? Or, do real-time systems require different technologies? The answers to these questions are becoming increasingly important as real-time [...]

Read Full Post »

Mutexes and Semaphores

For many software developers, the differences between a mutex and a semaphore is murky at best. This post summarizes and links to several recent articles that clarify the situation.

Read Full Post »

Most of the distributed systems we deal with at RTI have performance constraints at their core. Either the system is pushing the limits of the available resources, or the action-reaction timing is critical for a given event. In other words the constraint might be on throughput or latency (or increasingly latency vs. throughput). In these [...]

Read Full Post »

If you’re an old hand at messaging, but new to data distribution, the phrase “data-centric design” may sound like just a new way of describing the same old architectures. But data-centric and message-centric thinking differ in subtle-yet-important ways. Understanding those differences will help you pick the right tool for each job.

Read Full Post »

So you have a distributed system and you’re happily sending data between nodes in your system. The consumer applications are consuming the data your producer applications are producing, and everything is running smoothly. Now, that doesn’t sound like any system you know does it? Distributed systems are by nature complex. Nodes and applications are not [...]

Read Full Post »

Here at RTI, we take the concept of “Getting Started” to a new level with our Data Distribution Service (DDS) product. With the use of a code generation tool called “rtiddsgen”, new developers can actually create applications that will publish and subscribe their own data types.

Read Full Post »

When I moved to the US a decade ago, Home Improvement was a popular television sitcom, starring Tim Allen as Tim the tool man Taylor, a host of a made up home improvement show. Among the support team, when we learn about a new debugging tool, we frequently joke about ‘our network debugging tool belt’. [...]

Read Full Post »

A lot of people who have never used RTI’s infrastructure ask, “How do I prioritize my messages so that more important messages arrive before less important ones?” Yet almost no one worries about that once they’ve actually used our software. The reason is that, in RTI’s broker-free peer-to-peer infrastructure, there are no intermediate message queues to prioritize in the first place.

Read Full Post »

In my previous post, I detailed two resources for answers to commonly asked questions or to look up specific known issues. Of course that requires you to at last know what to ask or look for. Before getting there you probably want to find out more about how the middleware is doing, or in the [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »