2000 - 2001
Location: Seminar Room C406
Time: 2 pm - 3+ pm
Abstract:
The talk serves two points: first to give a brief overview over the work concerning evolvable software systems at the Department of Computer Science III at the University of Bonn; second to present and discuss in more detail some results of the EVOLVE project, which is a part of the work mentioned above.
The EVOLVE project addresses the question of how to use software components to build tailorable software systems. Tailorable software systems can be adapted to changing or diversified requirements after initial development and deployment. Traditionally, software components are used in the development phase of a software system in order to reduce costs and increase quality.
Component-based tailorability raises two main technical problems. First, one has to design an appropriate component model that permits the decomposition of a software system according to its expected evolution. The determining feature of a component model used for this purpose is the set of supported interaction primitives. Second, one needs a runtime and tailoring environment that manages the system's component structures. The environment should distinguish between a component plan and its instances, thus permitting the sharing of plans and their subsequent changes. Furthermore, in the case of shared component plans, a method is needed for restricting the effect of a change to subset of instances.
The second part of the presentation will give an overview of how these problems can be addressed - first on a theoretical level and then employing the example of the EVOLVE runtime and tailoring environment, which permits runtime tailoring of distributed component-based applications via a 3D interface.