Bringing architecture-based adaption to the mainstream

Software architecture has been shown to provide an appropriate level of granularity for representation of a managed software system and reasoning about the impact of adaptation choices on its properties. Software architecture-based adaptability is the ability to adapt a software system in terms of its architectural elements, such as its components and their interfaces. Despite its promise, architecture-based adaptation has remained largely elusive, mainly because it involves heavy engineering effort of making non-trivial changes to the manner in which a software system is implemented. In this paper, we present Acadia—a framework that automatically enables architecture-based adaptation of practically any Java 9+ application without requiring any changes to the implementation of the application itself. Acadia builds on the Java Platform Module System (JPMS), which has brought extensive support for architecture-based development to Java 9 and subsequent versions. Acadia extends JPMS with the ability to provide and maintain a representation of an application’s architecture and make changes to it at runtime. The results of our experimental evaluation, conducted on three large open-source Java applications, indicate that Acadia is able to efficiently apply dynamic changes to the architecture of these applications without requiring any changes to their implementation.