The Research On The Dynamic Reconfiguration Model Of Component-Based Distributed Software

Dynamic reconfiguration of distributed software has attracted much attention of research in recent years. Existing work on dynamic reconfiguration can be found in literature. However, how to compose and reconfigure a component-based distributed software (CBDS) remains a big challenge. Generally, distributed software components are homogeneous and components in the CBDS can be heterogeneous. The communication between the CBDS components is more complicated. Although the middleware technologies offer the support to work with heterogeneous and distributed components, they lack facilities to describe the global organization of a CBDS and dynamically reconfigure the CBDS. This paper mainly concerns with the dynamic reconfiguration of the CBDS.The paper presents a novel, graph-oriented approach, named as the GOPMCBS (Graph-Oriented Programming Model of Component-Based Software), for composing and reconfiguring the CBDS. Based on the GOPMCBS, the paper also probes into the deep related issues, including the description of software architecture for the CBDS, the seamless connection between design and programming of the CBDS, the analysis of dynamic component dependencies and dependencies description, the visualization of the GOPMCBS, and so on. The prototype implementation and experiments show that the GOPMCBS not only supports the composition and reconfiguration of the CBDS but also supports the powerful graph-oriented programming to make the development of the CBDS simpler and more visual. The GOPMCBS also partly supports the fault tolerance and the reuse of software architecture. The main contributions of the paper are as follows:(1) A novel graph-based dynamic reconfiguration model GOPMCBS is proposed. In the GOPMCBS, the software architecture of the CBDS is described as a logical graph, of which nodes represent components and edges denote the relationship between components. Marking an edge with a label shows what kind of relationship is between the components, such as method invocation, inheritance, and relevancies, etc. The GOPMCBS plays several important roles in the development of a CBDS. It not only provides an abstract graph-oriented framework for modeling, programming and dynamically reconfiguring a CBDS, but also acts as the communication middleware among the components of the CBDS.(2) The proposed model GOPMCBS unifies the whole process of software architecture description, dynamic reconfiguration and programming of the CBDS, thus really implements the seamless connection between the design and programming of the CBDS. Not only does the GOPMCBS support dynamic reconfiguration of the CBDS, but also provides users with unified graph-based primitives to describe the software architecture of the CBDS and program the CBDS. The dynamic reconfiguration and fault tolerance of the CBDS are also implemented by executing...