Towards Dynamic Component Updating: A Flexible and Lightweight Approach

Dynamic component updating, which allows a running system to be updated without interrupting its execution, has been recognized as an important requirement for distributed systems. However, most of existing approaches complicate the component development by making the component’s updating logic mixed with its business logic. This paper proposes a flexible and lightweight approach for supporting dynamic component updating. Our approach allows multiple versions of a component to co-exist with the support of runtime version management mechanism. Multiple polices are provided to coordinate behaviors of different component versions. In this way, seamless system updating can be achieved and the reliability during updating is also guaranteed. Moreover, our approach separates the component’s updating logic from its business logic and little burden are placed on developers. The experimental results show that the performance overhead is trivial.