Reifying configuration management for object-oriented software

Abstract

Using a solid Software Configuration Management (SCM) is mandatory to establish and maintain the integrity of the products of a software project throughout the project's software life cycle. Even with the help of sophisticated tools, handling the various dimensions of SCM can be a daunting (and costly) task for many projects. The contribution of this paper is to propose a method (based on the use Creational Design Patterns) to simplify SCM by reifying the variants of an object-oriented software system into language-level objects; and to show that newly available compilation technology makes this proposal attractive with respect to performance (memory footprint and execution time) by inferring which classes are needed for a specific configuration and optimizing the generated code accordingly. We demonstrate this idea on an artificial case study intended to be representative of a properly designed OO software. All the performance figures we get are obtained with freely available software, and, since the source code of our case study is also freely available, they are easily reproducible and checkable.

From feature models to feature toggles in practice

“…p u b l i c i n t e r f a c e Exp { v o i d p r i n t ( ) ; } p u b l i c i n t e r f a c e E x p E v a l e x t e n d s Exp { i n t e v a l ( ) ; } c l a s s L i t <E e x t e n d s Exp > i m p l e m e n t s Exp { i n t v a l u e ; The big advantage of this approach is that with the very same code base, we can now choose what is decided at derivation time, and what is still there to be decided at runtime. For instance, if we decide that Add is not selected at design time, the Listing 5 can (automatically) be specialized (along the lines proposed in [20]) so that there is no more reference to the class Add, which is then excluded from the jar built for this application.…”

“…Unifying design time and runtime variability is far from being a new idea. For instance [20] discussed how the use of an abstract factory pattern coupled with static analysis makes it possible to remove unselected features at compile time.…”

Software Product Line Engineering with the UML: Deriving Products

“…It allows defining an interface for creating a line of related objects. In [25], one of the authors proposed the use of this pattern to refine product derivation at compilation time. Our aim in this subsection is to reuse again this pattern as a design of the PL decision model.…”

Model-Driven Engineering for Software Product Lines

“…For example, the contribution of [40] is to propose a method to reify the variants of an object-oriented software system into language-level objects; and to show that newly available compilation technology makes this proposal attractive with respect to performance (memory footprint and execution time) by inferring which classes are needed for a specific configuration and optimizing the generated code accordingly. This approach opens the possibility of leveraging the good modeling capabilities of objectoriented languages to deal with fully dynamic software configuration, while being able to produce space and time efficient executable when the program contains enough static configuration information.…”