Dependency Management in Software Component Deployment

Journal of Computer Science, 2007

This paper discusses dependencies analysis significance when updating component-based system dynamically. It presents a service-based matrix model and nested graph as approaches to capture components' dependencies; it discusses using dependencies analysis for safe dynamic updating in component-based software systems; we advocate using service-based dependencies rather than component-based which refelect accurate effect during dynamic reconfiguration.

Software - Practice and Experience, 2005

Component technology promotes code reuse by enabling the construction of complex applications by assembling off-the-shelf components. However, components depend on certain characteristics of the environment in which they execute. They depend on other software components and on hardware resources.

Methodologies and Technologies

The software engineering community touts component-based software engineering as a solution for many of its woes including reducing cycle time, reducing costs, increasing productivity, allowing easier integration to name just a few. Indeed, many Web-based systems are now built with open-source and vendor provided component technologies. While these advances have led to improvements in the development process, they have also led to a great deal of pressure on downstream processes as these systems must be deployed, tuned, and supported. The complexities in deploying and supporting component-based software for distributed and Web-based applications are not understood in the academic or professional communities. This chapter stresses the need for addressing this problem by presenting component-based software for Web applications from a deployment perspective, characterizing the issues through real-world experiences with highly component-based applications, and presents strategies and directions for the community to pursue.

Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems, 1999

Recent developments in Component technology enable the construction of complex software systems by assembling together off-the-shelf components. However, it is still difficult to develop efficient, reliable, and dynamically configurable component-based systems. Components are often developed by different groups with different methodologies. Unspecified dependencies and behavior lead to unexpected failures.

E-Government Strategies and Advancements, 2011

2006

Large and complex software systems, like those common on personal computers, often contain many components that can be deployed separately—applications, libraries, drivers, etc.—but that must then be bound together into working configurations. Configuring software is difficult and error-prone in practice, and it is not well understood in theory. As a result, real software systems are often configured in ways that are fragile and undependable. To address these problems, we present a novel and precise model for reasoning about software configurations, and the processes by which they are constructed. We can compare our framework to existing software deployment tools, such as Windows Installer and the RPM Package Manager, and formalize desirable properties of software configurations.

2006

As the size and complexity of software systems increases, the reuse of independent pieces of software combined in different ways to implement complex software systems has become a widely accepted practice. The operating system and middleware environments provide some support for representing the dependencies among software components in an explicit way. This representation can be manipulated in order to automate the deployment and configuration of new software applications. The variety of dependencies could be very large, while the complexity of inter-dependencies very high. This paper discusses this issue in terms of Rough Set Theory. We focus on software requirements, defined as dependencies and their relative structure. In this paper we introduce a procedure, a formalization model for eliminating conflicting and redundant requirements and matching the requirements of large distributed applications to the system capabilities.

13th Annual IEEE International Symposium and Workshop on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems (ECBS'06), 2006

With significant advances in software development technologies in recent years, it is now possible to have complex software applications, which include a large number of heterogeneous software components distributed over a large network of computers with different computational capabilities. To run such applications, their components must be instantiated on proper hardware resources in their target environments so that some requirements and constraints are met. This process is called software deployment. For large, distributed, component-based applications with many constraints and requirements, it is difficult to do the deployment process manually, and some automated tools and techniques are required. This paper presents a graph-based approach for this purpose that is not dependent on any specific component technology and does the deployment planning with respect to the communication resources required by application components and communication resources available on the hosts in the target environment. In our approach, component-based applications and distributed environments are modeled with the help of graphs. Deployment of an application is then defined as the mapping of the application graph to the target environment graph.

International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems, 2014

Real-time systems are considered in most cases as critical systems because they must strictly satisfy expected requirements in respect to giving timing constraints. The best way to develop and deploy these complex systems is the component-based software engineering. Traditionally, software components are developed independently and often considered as black boxes. However, they might be dependent from each other at assembly and deployment stages and used by a third party in various environments. In a previous work (Belguidoum et al., 2011), we have proposed a Maude-based framework for safe component installation. In this paper, we extend this work by taking into account real-time constraints for installation operation. This framework is implemented using Real-Time Maude system enabling both the real-time installation execution and its formal analysis using its LTL model checker.

Embedded and self-adaptive systems demand continuous adaptation and reconfiguration activities based on changing quality conditions and context information. As a consequence, systems have to be (re)deployed several times and software components need to be mapped onto new or existing hardware pieces. Today, the way to determine an optimal deployment in complex systems, often performed at runtime, constitutes a well-known challenge. In this paper we highlight the major problems of automatic deployment and present a research plan to reach for an UML-based solution for the deployment of componentized systems. As a first step towards a solution, we use the UML superstructure to suggest a way to redeploy UML component diagrams based on the inputs and outputs required to enact an automatic deployment process. ⋆ This work has been partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER) and Spanish Government under CICYT project SETI (TIN2009-07366) and by the Andalusian Government under ISABEL (TIC-2533) and THEOS (TIC-5906) projects.