An infrastructure for development of ynamically adaptable distributed components

Abstract

Dynamic adaptation has become an essential feature in distributed applications, mainly because current technology enables complex tasks to be performed by computers in application domains unsuited for service interruption. This paper presents an infrastructure that uses an interpreted language to provide simple but powerful features that enable coarse and fine-grained adaptations in component-based systems, using the CORBA Component Model (COM) as a basis. To extend the static nature of COM, we propose dynamic containers, which enable development of dynamically adaptable components that admit changes on component structure and implementation. The extended set of mechanisms for component manipulation can be used to create adaptation abstractions that simplify the programmer's task. In this paper, we present a tool that provides support for the protocols and roles abstractions, which allows programmers to adapt running applications, establishing new interactions among its components.