Autonomous Reconfiguration Procedures for EJB-based Enterprise Applications
This addresses the need for continuous operation in business-critical enterprise software, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing technologies like mKernel and EJB.
The paper tackles the problem of maintaining availability during the evolution of Enterprise Applications by enabling seamless reconfiguration while the system is running, using an approach based on the Autonomic Computing infrastructure mKernel for EJB 3.0 technology, which provides a comprehensive set of steps and reusable strategies for fine-grained reconfiguration tasks.
Enterprise Applications (EA) are complex software systems for supporting the business of companies. Evolution of an EA should not affect its availability, e.g., because of a temporal shutdown, business operations may be affected. One possibility to address this problem is the seamless reconfiguration of the affected EA, i.e., applying the relevant changes while the system is running. Our approach to seamless reconfiguration focuses on component-oriented EAs. It is based on the Autonomic Computing infrastructure mKernel that enables the management of EAs that are realized using Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 technology. In contrast to other approaches that provide no or only limited reconfiguration facilities, our approach consists of a comprehensive set of steps, that perform fine-grained reconfiguration tasks. These steps can be combined into generic and autonomous reconfiguration procedures for EJB-based EAs. The procedures are not limited to a certain reconfiguration strategy. Instead, our approach provides several reusable strategies and is extensible w.r.t. the opportunity to integrate new ones.