Runtime Reconfiguration of J2EE Applications

Abstract

Runtime reconfiguration considered as "applying required changes to a running system" plays an important role for providing high availability not only of safety- and mission-critical systems, but also for commercial web-applications offering professional services. Hereby, the main concerns are maintaining the consistency of the running system during reconfiguration and minimizing its down-time caused by the reconfiguration. This paper focuses on the platform independent subsystem that realises deployment and redeployment of J2EE modules based on the new J2EE Deployment API as a part of the implementation of our proposed system architecture enabling runtime reconfiguration of component-based systems. Our "controlled runtime redeployment" comprises an extension of hot deployment and dynamic reloading, complemented by allowing for structural change