Integrating Container Services with Pluggable System Extensions

Common middleware platforms support software components by providing a number of standard container services. Adding new container services can adapt a system to changed requirements without modifying its constituent components. Custom-made container services can intercept communication calls between system’s components and enforce new or changed requirements. Hence, legacy or off-the-shelf components can be adapted to comply with requirements that are not taken into consideration by the initial system design. In a global market, companies must be able to quickly adapt their software systems to requirement changes. However, not all middleware platforms allow to integrate additional container services, yet. This paper describes a framework that enables developers to dynamically integrate additional container services into existing systems and to configure them at runtime. Moreover, the framework allows for conditional execution of these services – they can adapt to the system’s state or its current context.