An Application Server to Support Online Evolution

Most online evolution of application depends on its runtime environment. This paper addresses how to support online evolution by application server, which is considered as third kind of system software, besides OS and DBMD. From view of requirements, evolutions of software can be divided into four categories: evolutions that do not alter requirements, evolutions that alter functional requirements, evolutions that alter local constraint requirements, and evolutions that alter global constraint requirements. All changes at the requirement level should be mapped to changes at the implementation level. In our approach, implementation level entities, such as components and interceptors are responsible for online evolution. Evolutions in implementation level include adding, removing, updating, and reconfiguring the entities. One of the keys to our approach is to carefully distinguish states of components and interceptors, that is, whether they are in a ready, active, executing or evolving s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Qianxiang Wang, Feng Chen, Hong Mei, Fuqing Yang
• Keywords: Application Server, ICSM 2002, Implementation Level, Online Evolution, Software Engineering