Support pour la reconfiguration d'implantation dans les applications a composants Java

DECOR04 (2004) 171-184 Nowadays, numerous component models are used for various purposes: to build applications, middleware or even operating systems. Those models commonly support structure reconfiguration, that is modification of application's architecture at runtime. On the other hand, very few allow implementation reconfiguration, that is runtime modification of the code of components building the application. In this article we present the work we performed on JULIA, a Java-based implementation of the FRACTAL component model, in order for it to support implementation reconfigurations. We show how we overcame the limitations of Java class loading mechanism to allow runtime modifications of components' implementation and interfaces. We also describe the integration of our solution with the JULIA ADL.