An approach to the dynamic evolution of software systems

In this PhD thesis we advocate that connections between different software entities hinders the ability to make applications evolve at runtime. Our goal is thus to free entities from connections. Therefore, we built a disconnected communication architecture based on three main concepts: associative naming, late binding and asynchrony of communications. Communication occurs following an all-service approach (e.g. a method is a service) where a service request and invocation occur through a semantic description. The choice of the service that best matches the description of the requested service is performed at the moment of the invocation. In the thesis, we describe several implementations of disconnected architectures and applications. An interesting result is that we were able to obtain 99.99% availability for a web server (4 restarts in 18 months) while having some parts of the code modified more than 160 times.