1 of 19 Configuring Distributed Systems in a Java-based Environment Judith Bishop and Louis Botha Department of Computer Science University of Pretoria Pretoria 0002 South Africa jbishop@cs.up.ac.za , lbotha@zeus.com Abstract Two advances in system design over the past decade are brought together in this paper to enhance the process of building distributed systems. Component based programming separates the construction of computational units from their configuration into complex systems. An accepted technique for configuring components is to use an architectural description languages such as Darwin. The resulting system then runs on an environment such as Regis. Arriving later, Java emphasises the presence of the network, and thereby facilitates large scale distributed programming. This paper presents the design, implementation and assessment of Jaden, a runtime environment written in and based on Java, which will support component based programming. Though most of the functions of Darwin’s Regis environment are present in Jaden, its internal structure is very different. Our results show that using Java’s built-in networking makes for a simpler system with controllable system overhead and good scalability properties. Keywords : component based programming, configurable distributed systems, Darwin, Regis, Java, RMI