JPloy: User-Centric Deployment Support in a Component Platform

Based on a vision that, in the future, applications will be flexibly built out of small-grained components, we argue that current technologies do not adequately support component deployment in such a setting. Specifically, current technologies realize deployment processes where most decisions are made by the application manufacturer. When using small-grained components, however, the component user needs to have more control over the deployment process; user-centric deployment is needed. In this paper, we describe our initial efforts at providing user-centric deployment. We present JPloy, a prototypical tool that gives a user more control about the configuration of installed Java components. JPloy extends the Java class loader so that custom configurations can be applied to existing components, without having to modify the components themselves. For example, name space or versioning conflicts among components can be elegantly resolved in this way. We demonstrate JPloy by applying it to an example application.