% $Id: abstract.tex 3814 2006-09-13 18:00:27Z gokhale $

\begin{abstract}

Effective provisioning of next generation distributed applications
hosted on diverse middleware platforms incurs significant challenges
due to the applications' growing complexity and quality of service
(QoS) requirements.  An effective provisioning of the middleware
platform includes a composition and configuration of the middleware
services that meets the application QoS requirements under expected
workloads.  Traditional techniques for middleware provisioning tend to
use non-intuitive, low-level and technology-specific approaches, which
are tedious, error prone, non-reusable and not amenable to ease of QoS
validation.   Additionally, most often the configuration activities of
the middleware platform tend to be decoupled from the QoS
validation stages resulting in an iterative trial-and-error process
between the two phases.  This paper describes the design of a visual
modeling language called POSAML (Patterns Oriented Software
Architecture Modeling Language) and associated tools that provide an
intuitive, higher level and unified framework for provisioning
middleware platforms.  POSAML provides visual modeling capabilities
for middleware-independent provisioning while allowing
automated middleware-specific QoS validation.

\end{abstract}

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