Pierre-Yves Cunin

Support for Software Federations: The PIE Platform

Research about software processes modelling and support, even during the last decade, has suffered from a lack of practical credibility. Most of the solutions proposed have not gained wide acceptance by the software industry and, moreover, some fundamental issues like evolution have not yet found ant reasonable solution. For these reasons, it was a clear decision in the PIE project to build a platform providing the requisite features for evolution support, and also addressing many of the aspects that have so far impeded wide acceptance of process support.

Adapting applications on the fly

Summary form only given. Adapting a component-based application means adapting one or more of its components, and in general, adapting a component at run-time means disconnecting it from the application and connecting a new version of this component. Many approaches like OLAN and DCUP are based on component models in which each component is constituted by a functional part and a control part. This last part provides a set of services to administrate the component. In our approach we aim to separate the control part outside the component. The benefit is the possibility to apply our solutions to existing models that have not been designed to support the dynamic adaptation. Through a first experimentation on the JavaBeans component model, we define an adaptation process composed of several steps: (1) defining the mapping rules between the old and the new component (correspondence between properties and services); (2) passivating the old and the new components; (3) transferring the state of the old component into the new one according to the mapping rules defined before; (4) disconnecting the old component and connecting the new one; (5) activating the new component. These steps may constitute the basic activities of an adaptation machine.

The PIE project : An introduction

This paper is a brief presentation of the PIE (Process Instance Evolution) ESPRIT project. It is not supposed to be a research paper but to provide overall information about the project and its objectives. It should be considered as an introduction to the research papers presented by partners of the project.

Improving Software Process Modelling and Enactment Techniques

Most of the work previously carried out on software processes addressed the problem of modelling as a monolithic description focusing on one perspective e.g. product, process, role, etc. Little has been done to address the problem of software process modelling through the dynamic composition of consistent and reusable pre-composed components. To build software processes from components, there are many concerns to take into consideration: 1) building a software information base of reusable components, 2) determining the components that make up a process model, while this composition is achieved dynamically to assure the mutual consistency of components, 3) how to achieve integration to support full product, activity and role perspectives, 4) how to incrementally construct the model by introducing new components or updating component versions in order to deal with evolution.

ORYA: a strategy oriented deployment framework

The current trend consists in deploying, on each machine, a specific version of an application, according to the choices of the enterprise and users, with constraints verified by the target site. To support automated deployment, we propose a model-based deployment framework named ORYA which allows to define and execute deployment strategies. This paper presents and illustrates the concept of deployment strategy supported by the framework.

Designing and building software federations

Commercial Off The Shelf tools (COTS) are now widely distributed, of good quality, relatively cheap and cover most of the application domains. It is thus a surprise to consider that it is uncommon to reuse COTS when building large applications. At least it is recognized that building a large application based on COTS is a tough issue. This paper seeks to show why COTS reuse is not a reality: we show why usual composition does not work, and what are the issues to solve in order to make effective (re)use of COTS when building new applications. We show the solutions we have applied, and we describe the early experience with our prototype.

Modelling and managing software federations

Building large software applications from Commerical Off The Shelf tools (COTS) is not an industrial reality so far. This work presents a new approach to solve the different problems found when building a federation of COTS.

Process Instance Evolution-PIE

The objective of PIE is to define a framework that will allow non-specialist managers to pilot and to implement on-line dynamic evolution and changes to work activity supported by instances of process models.

View-based mechanisms for structured and distributed enactment

The goal of process support technology is to provide tools for capture, definition. representation. instantiation and enaction (execution) of process models [2, 31. In the early stages of research on this domain, a relatively simplistic definition of the processes had to be taken in order that the massive technological problems could be addressed. Nowadays they have largely been solved and a number of technologies are available. Therefore these simplistic definitions do not adequately cater for the realities of the commercial world and are no longer tenable. Existing process support technology should be enhanced to overcome these limitations.