Active Support for the Evolution of Component-Based Software

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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.