Feature-oriented runtime adaptation

Abstract

Creating tailor-made programs based on the concept of software product lines (SPLs) gains more and more momentum. This is, because SPLs significantly decrease development costs and time to market while increasing product's quality. Especially highly available programs benefit from the quality improvements caused by an SPL. However, after a program variant is created from an SPL and then started, the program is completely decoupled from its SPL. Changes within the SPL, i.e., source code of its features do not affect the running program. To apply the changes, the program has to be stopped, recreated, and restarted. This causes at least short time periods of program unavailability which is not acceptable for highly available programs. Therefore, we present a novel approach based on class replacements and Java HotSwap that allows to apply features to running programs. Copyright 2009 ACM.