Content Summary | We are concerned with the issues faced by software developers with
a certain family of distributed applications; those that connect to and
interoperate with a heterogeneous infrastructure, i.e., a large heterogeneous
collection of external systems (databases, embedded devices, equipment,
internet servers etc.) using different communication protocols. This product
family includes applications such as e-commerce systems, network management
and provisioning applications and Grid-based collaborations. For such
applications, implementing the interoperation logic is both challenging and
expensive. We discuss the major concerns that contribute to the problem. These
include system concerns, such as transaction support, security and management,
as well as development concerns, such as integration with workflow or
component frameworks. We propose an architecture and related development
methodology, based on generative programming, to reduce implementation
complexity, allow for rapid application development, ease deployment and
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