Incommunicado: efficient communication for isolates

Abstract

Executing computations in a single instance of safe language virtual machine can improve performance and overall platform scalability. It also poses various challenges. One of them is providing a fast inter-application communication mechanism. In addition to being efficient, such a mechanism should not violate any functional and non-functional properties of its environment, and should also support enforcement of application-specific security policies. This paper explores the design and implementation of a communication substrate for applications executing within a single Java virtual machine modified to enable safe and interference-free execution of isolated computations. Designing an efficient extension that does not break isolation properties and at the same time pragmatically offers an intuitive API has proven non-trivial. This paper demonstrates a set of techniques that lead to at least an eight-fold performance improvement over the in-process inter-application communication using standard mechanisms offered by the Java platform.