Future Work

We have two primary efforts planned for extensions to the plugin scheduler.

• Additional information services: We plan to add functionalities to enable the application developer to access and use data concerning the internal state of the DIET server (e.g., the current length of request queues). As other performance measurement and evaluation tools are developed both within and external to the DIET project (see Chapter 8), some tools are already available to enable such information to be incorporated in the context of the plugin scheduler.
• Enhanced aggregation methods: The plugin scheduler implemented in the current release enables the DIET system to account for user-defined factors in the server selection process. However, the priority aggregation method is fairly rudimentary and lacks the power to express many imaginable comparison mechanisms. We plan to investigate methods to embed code into DIET agents (e.g., a simple expression interpreter) in a manner that is secure and that preserves performance.