Active Support for the Evolution of Component-Based Software

新墨西哥州立大学库克，乔纳森在这个信息时代，计算机几乎已经进入了社会和生活的方方面面，未来人们期待无处不在的通信计算机，从随身携带的pda手机，工作和家庭的台式机，旅行笔记本电脑和智能汽车。在这个始终联网的世界中，可以预期这些系统将自动接收和利用软件升级、新的软件应用程序等。今天的软件已经朝着自动的、基于组件的软件进化迈出了试探性的第一步，但是在这些机制中，对软件组件的进化没有真正的控制。相反，用户非常熟悉系统组件中不匹配的问题，错误的时间更改。克服这些问题对于开发“永远在线”的无所不在计算的未来至关重要。该项目将利用动态的、分布式的、基于组件的软件体系结构，并将追求主动技术，以帮助在系统执行和整个系统发展过程中保持可靠性。具体而言，本研究将探讨动态组合和控制多个版本的组件，以提高整个系统在其发展过程中的可靠性。目标是提供一个可以检查、管理和操作组件版本的框架。这样的框架将允许将新版本的组件引入系统以引入增强功能，同时仍然保持旧版本在线，以保护系统免受破坏现有功能的意外故障。此外，它将启用基本的组件管理工具，这些工具将允许组件的自检，并支持对系统中存在的动态版本依赖项的基本推理。

ABSTRACT0306457New Mexico State UniversityCook, JonathanIn this age of information, computers have entered virtually every aspect of society and life, andthe future holds expectations of ubiquitous communicating computers, from the PDA-cellphones onthe belt, the desktops at work and home, the traveling laptop, and the smart car. In this alwaysnetworkedworld, it is to be expected that these systems will automatically receive and utilize software upgrades, new software applications, and the like. Today's software has taken the tentative first steps towards automatic, component-based software evolution, but in these mechanisms there is no real control over the evolving software components. Rather, users are quite familiar with the problems of mis-matched, wrongly timed changes in system components. Overcoming these problems will be crucial to developing the \always-on" future of ubiquitous computing. This project will take advantage of the rise in dynamic, distributed, component-based software architectures, and will pursue active techniques to help maintain reliability during system execution and throughout system evolution.Specifically, this research will investigate dynamically combining and controlling multiple versionsof components to increase the overall system reliability throughout its evolution. The goal is to provide a framework where component versions can be inspected, managed, and manipulated. Such a framework will allow new versions of components to be brought into a system to introduce enhancements, while still keeping older versions on-line to protect the system against accidental faults that break existing functionality. In addition, it will enable basic component management facilities that will allow self-checking of components and enable basic reasoning about the dynamic version dependencies that exist in the system.