Using Component-Based Development and Web Technologies to Support a Distributed Data Management System*

Over recent years, "Internet-able" applications have been used to support domains where distributed functionality is essential. This flexibility is also pertinent in situations where data is collected and derived to support a distributed set of stakeholders. There are major problems in this distributed data management scenario. One problem is the change that occurs in such domains. Both the schema of the data and the individual needs of the stakeholders evolve over time. Any architecture to support this distributed data management domain must be designed to support these specific changes. One such approach to this architecture is the use of "plug-able" web-based components. As new computational needs arise, new components can be plugged into the architecture. Another aspect of this solution architecture is toward a run-time evolvable process to support the change of the data schemas. At the MITRE Corporation, this architecture has been designed, deployed and tested to support the internal need for a composite data repository. This paper presents the motivation and architecture of this distributed data management system that supports the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD). This component-based run-time configurable architecture is implemented using web-based technologies, such as the Extensible Markup Language (XML), Java Servlets, and a relational database management system (RDBMS). * Copyright 2001, The MITRE Corporation. All rights reserved. This is the copyright work of the MITRE Corporation and was produced for the U.S. Government under Contract Number DTFA01-93-C-00001 and is subject to Federal Acquisition Regulation Clause 52.227-14, Rights in Data-General, Alt. III (JUN1987) and Alt. IV (JUN 1987).