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Software AdaptationJ.UCS Special Issue(University of Málaga, Spain canal@lcc.uma.es) (University of Extremadura, Spain juanmamu@unex.es) (University of Evry Val d'Essonne, France and ARLES Project-Team, INRIA, France pascal.poizat@inria.fr) The development of distributed systems requires means to structure them in order to leverage their complexity. This has led in the last years to different structuring means, e.g., modules, objects, components and services. Systems are then built as assemblies of these smaller and reusable entities. Coordination addresses the description of the interactions between entities and provides one with effective expressive means to compose them. Coordination is a hot topic in Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), e.g., for Web Services where choreography and orchestration are instances of the coordination concept. Components and services should be reusable and composable from their interfaces. Yet, basic signature based interfaces have proven insufficient for this, requiring more expressive interface description languages, such as Behavioural IDLs (BIDLs). BIDLs support component discovery, composability and substitutability checking. With the emergence of SOA, BIDLs have also proven to be valuable to discover and compose services. However, software entities seldom match perfectly as they often have been developed independently from the context in which they are to be reused. This can lead to lower discovery results or deadlocking component or service architectures. Page 2107 Adaptation processes should combine solution from different
research domains, namely (i) model-based or formal approaches to
develop mismatch detection and adaptor models generation algorithms,
(ii) middleware technology to support the detection of mismatch at
run-time and the implementation of adaptor models, and (iii) QoS and
prediction models to assess the effect of adaptation on running
systems. Software adaptation has been tackled mainly at the
behavioural interface (protocol) level, yet it should be addressed at
any of the four interface levels: signatures, behaviours, non
functional properties (time, QoS) and semantics. The International Workshop on Coordination and Adaptation
Techniques for Software Entities (WCAT) is a venue dedicated to lively
and working discussion on these topics and has led in the previous
years to active collaborations between its participants. With
reference to the previous editions of the workshop, the 2007 edition
(http://wcat.unex.es/wcat07/)
addressed more specifically issues related to coordination and
adaptation at run-time, the implementation of coordinators and
adaptors, context-aware and dynamically evolving coordination or
adaptation contracts, and relations between service composition and
adaptation in pervasive computing. The scientific program of WCAT 2007 consisted of 10 accepted
papers. Due to the high-quality of the discussions they fostered at
the venue, the organizers decided to organize a special issue related
to the workshop topics. The Program Committee invited authors of papers presented at the
workshop to send a revised and extended version of their works for
considering its publication in this J.UCS special issue. Moreover, the
call was open to the whole community working on software
adaptation. This resulted in the end in 9 high-quality papers being
submitted to the special issue, 3 being extensions of papers
originally presented at the workshop. After a double blind review
phase resulting in additional requests and recommendations to authors,
the 5 papers presented in this special issue were finally accepted.
We would like to thank the members of the international Program
Committee that has been set up for their careful work in all steps of
the review process. Page 2108 We are also grateful to the J.UCS editorial team for their help and
kindness while preparing this issue.
Carlos Canal Page 2109 |
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