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  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 Member and Prof. Kaiser was an Academic Visitor. Kaiser is supported by National Science Foundation grants CCR-9000930 and CCR-8858029, by grants from AT&T, BNR, DEC and SRA, by the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Computers and Information Systems and by the NSF Engineering Research Center for Telecommunications Research. An extended abstract of this paper titled "Dynamic Reconfiguration in an Object-Based Programming Language with Distributed Shared Data" appeared in the Eleventh International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Arlington TX, May 1991, pp. 73-80. keywords: abstract types, distributed system, dynamic object update, portfolio management, soft realtime processing