An incremental and practical approach to enable the component run-time evolution

Abstract

It is a desirable capability for some types of software-intensive systems to be able to modify components or architecture at the run-time. In this paper, we investigate how to enable the run-time modification of components in a system originally developed without catering for this feature at its design phase. In our proposed approach, components are incrementally and optionally wrapped with two categories of reflection interfaces, namely introspection (retrospection) interfaces that are designed to expose the component properties, while intercession (reconfiguration) interfaces that are designed to conduct run-time changes. We implement the incremental reflection interfaces as a library by leveraging the idea of poke technique that is widely used in many practical accessibility projects. A case study is used to demonstrate how our approach can enhance components with the reflection capacity on the basis of the legacy program code. Compared with existing techniques, our approach does not require systems re-developed from scratch in order to support the run-time modification of components.