Aims and learning outcomes

The course presents the main technologies used to ease development of distributed systems. The concept of distributed system is introduced first, together with the concept of middleware technology. This introductory material is followed by a description of the various classes of middleware systems, including those for implementing service-based applications. For each middleware class, one or more representatives is described in details, with several examples of usage. At the end of the course the students will be able to choose the best kind of middleware for a given distributed problem and they
will be able to apply the various middleware systems studied to solve practical case studies.

Syllabus

The course spans the following topics:

- Introduction to distributed systems and middleware technologies

- Principles of concurrent programming for distributed systems

- Programming high-performance computing systems (openmp and MPI)

- Service-Oriented Middleware
   - Fundamentals of SOA
   - Web Service technologies: XML (JAXB), SOAP (Simple Ojbect Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Service Description Language), WS-Addressing
   - REST: Representational State Transfer

- Object-Oriented Middleware (RMI)

- Message Oriented Middleware (JMS)

- Middleware for big data analytics (map-reduce: hadoop and pig)

- Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks

Prerequisites

Students should have a basic knowledge of Object-Oriented programing (in C++ and Java) and the principles of networking and distributed systems.

Written exam + evaluation of the projects assigned during the course.