Proteus
Grid systems span manifold organizations and application domains. Because this diverse environment inevitably engenders multiple protocols, interoperability mechanisms are crucial to seamless, pervasive access. Proteus is a multiprotocol library for integrating multiple message protocols, such as SOAP and JMS, within one system. Proteus decouples application code from protocol code at run-time, allowing clients to incorporate separately developed protocols without recompiling or halting. Since Proteus interposes at a higher level than most multiprotocol designs, a third-party protocol implementation can be added to Proteus via a wrapper, leaving the original protocol code unchanged. Through generic serialization, which separates the transfer syntax from the message type, protocols which support dynamic invocation can also be added independently of serialization routines. Proteus also incorporates performance-enhancing mechanisms for Grid services that examine metadata, but pass actual data through opaquely (such as adapters). The interface provided to protocol implementors is general enough to support protocols as disparate as our current implementations: SOAP, JMS, and binary. Proteus is written in C++; a Java port is planned.