A Component Model Supporting Dynamic Evolution of Internetware

Abstract

Aiming at the forward topics of self-adapting Internetware, relying on the practical software engineering technology and previous research achievements of tackling key problems of SoftMan, the paper puts forward a novel component model ——SMC(SoftMan Component), which processes reflectivity, opening, adapting and supporting nested assembly and self-adjusting its internal architecture. Furthermore, the basic design specifications of APIs are described in detail. By the special structure of Component Body, SMC forms a hierarchical management domain which is of explicit constraint of father-child between component and its children, and thus it flexibly integrates control mechanisms for sub-components, such as interface introspection, lifecycle, interaction binding, dynamic configuration, etc., into its pluggable controllers so as to be endowed with the ability to change its behavior and architecture when the application must evolve to cope with user requirements and new context. Initial experiments demonstrate that SMC can give effective support for dynamic reconfiguration during running, and it takes on own technical characteristics compared with other component models.