An Architecture for Dynamic Reconfiguration in a Distributed Object-Based Programming Language

Distributed applications ideally 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 real-time financial services, it is necessary to support finer grained reconfiguration at the level of entities smaller than processes, but for performance reasons it is desirable to avoid conventional approaches that require 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 apply this scheme in the context of an object-based programming language that supports shared data in a distributed environment. Copyright Ó 1991 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 Me..