The York Research Database

Software maintenance and reengineering are traditionally considered as static operations. In this article, we advocate that dynamic maintenance is also possible. Though adaptable applications are able to change their behavior in order to fit to the current situation and thus evolve at runtime we can hardly consider that it is maintenance, as most adaptable applications are very limited in their possibilities of evolution. In this article we describe experiences made with the LuckyJ architecture based on decoupled asynchronous communications between components that allow to have an application completely and arbitrarily modified at runtime. In particular, we show common patterns that we discovered by experimentation.