Information Bus

The Information Bus -- An Architecture for Extensible Distributed Systems

Brian Oki, Manfred Puluegl, Alex Siegel, and Dale Skeen

presented at the 1993 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Asheville, North Carolina, USA

This seems to be an implementation of what MultiCaster is talking about. Objects are multicast to "subscribers" by "publishers". The addressing model is Subject Based Addressing(TM) (gag me with a trademark), and the subscribers can wildcard the subjects they subscribe to, similar to MultiCaster's hierarchical addresses. Transmissions are alleged to be reliable, assuming no hardware faults.

I could write more -- or you could read the paper. It's interesting work, but the presentation at SOSP got a little personal, with David Cheriton setting the stage by slamming the ISIS folks from CornellUniversity? right before the Information Bus presentation, which in turn got slammed by the ISIS folks (apparently Cheriton was involved with Teknekron).

-- BillTrost

Any tips on where to find the paper referenced above?

Any university library that subscribes to all the ACM publications will have it. SOSP is part of the SIGOS series. Ask the librarian.

Teknekron are now Tibco (The Information Bus Company), so information about their architecture will be http://www.tibco.com.

And Alex and Dale left Tibco long ago and formed a new company (http://www.vitria.com), taking publish-subscribe a step further.

You can get at the paper here: http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/ops/168619/p58-oki/ if you register for the Digital Library at http://www.acm.org/. Its free. If you search for Cheriton you can also get some of the slagging match papers.