Service Availability: Principles and Practice

Chapter 11

SA Forum Programming Model and API Conventions

Francis Tam

Nokia Research Center, Helsinki, Finland

11.1 Introduction

In Part Two of the book, we have discussed the founding principles, motivation behind the design, usage scenarios, and limitations of the Service Availability (SA) Forum services and frameworks. In this chapter, we turn our attention to how we can use these services and frameworks in practice.

For developers, one of the first places to look for implementation related information is the service's Application Programming Interface (API) definition sections of the specification. In the SA Forum specifications, all the service and administrative APIs are defined using the C programming language [92]. The question typically asked by people has been: why C? It was a decision based on the member companies at the time when the specifications were developed. This represented a common ground for the participating companies, one of the key characteristics of open standards development. This decision was chiefly backed by the evaluation of the language's suitability from a technical perspective. C is a well-known and popular candidate system implementation language for operating systems and embedded system applications, primarily due to its efficiency. It has been recognized for code portability across many different platforms. Its flexibility such as ease of access to hardware and relatively low demand on system resources at runtime add to the list of advantages ...