Sagar Sunkle, Mario Pukall. Using Reified Contextual Information for Safe Run-time Adaptation of Software Product Lines. 7th ECOOP'2010 Workshop on Reflection, AOP and Meta-Data for Software Evolution (RAM-SE'10), , June 2010.
Software product lines (SPLs) is a paradigm to implement software products based on features. Contemporary SPL implementation techniques provide support for compile-time composition of features. Many approaches have been suggested for run-time adaptation of product lines which do not consider safe composition properties. This paper presents FeatureJ which enables safe compile-time and run-time composition of multiple product lines. We identify four compilation techniques necessary to achieve safe run-time adaptation of product lines in FeatureJ: a) type checking of feature modules, b) availability of contextual information at run-time, c) resolving class-loading issues for multiple updated variants, and d) an application container for executing and updating multiple variants. Accordingly, we show how an existing approach can be integrated with FeatureJ to support safe run-time adaptation.