Dynamic reconfiguration in an object-based programming language with distributed shared data

On-line distributed applications generally allow reconfiguration while the application is running, but changes are usually limited to adding new client and server processes and changing the bindings among such processes. In some application domains, such as on-line financial services, it is necessary to support finer grained reconfiguration at the level of entities within processes, but for performance reasons it is desirable to avoid conventional approaches such as interpretation and dynamic storage allocation. We present a scheme for special cases of fine grained dynamic reconfiguration sufficient for our application domain and show how it can be used for practical changes. We introduce new language concepts to implement this scheme in the context of an object-based programming language that supports shared data in a distributed environment. Copyright  1990 Brent Hailpern and Gail E. Kaiser Part of this work was completed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center while Dr. Hailpern was a Research Staff Member and Prof. Kaiser was an Academic Visitor. Prof. Kaiser is supported by National Science Foundation grants CCR-9000930, CDA-8920080 and CCR-8858029, by grants from AT&T, BNR, Citicorp, DEC, IBM, Siemens, SRA, Sun and Xerox, by the Center for Advanced Technology and by the Center for Telecommunications Research. topics: Coordination languages, tools and software engineering; Soft real-time issues and financial applications