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Abstract. Distributed parallel applications often run for hours or even days before arriving to a result. In the case of such long-running programs, the initial requirements could change after the program has started executing. To shorten the time it takes to arrive to a result when running a distributed computationally-intensive application, this paper proposes leveraging the power and flexibility of dynamic software updates. In particular, to enable flexible dynamic software updates, we introduce a novel binary rewriting approach that is more efficient than the existing techniques. While ensuring greater flexibility in enhancing a running program for new requirements, our binary rewriting technique incurs only negligible performance overhead. We validate our approach via a case study of dynamically changing a parallel scientific simulation.

Manual refactoring edits are error prone, as refactoring requires developers to coordinate related transformations and understand the complex inter-relationship between affected types, methods, and variables. We present RefDistiller, a refactoring-aware code review tool that can help developers detect potential behavioral changes in manual refactoring edits. It first detects the types and locations of refactoring edits by comparing two program versions. Based on the reconstructed refactoring information, it then detects potential anomalies in refactoring edits using two techniques: (1) a template-based checker for detecting missing edits and (2) a refactoring separator for detecting extra edits that may change a program's behavior. By helping developers be aware of deviations from pure refactoring edits, RefDistiller can help developers have high confidence about the correctness of manual refactoring edits. RefDistiller is available as an Eclipse plug-in at https: //sites.google.com/site/refdistiller/ and its demonstration video is available at http://youtu.be/0Iseoc5HRpU.

An essential part of modern enterprise software development is metadata. Mainstream metadata formats, including XML deployment descriptors and Java 5 annotations, suffer from a number of limitations that complicate the development and maintenance of enterprise applications. Their key problem is that they make it impossible to reuse metadata specifications not only across different applications but even across smaller program constructs such as classes or methods.To provide better enterprise metadata, we present patternbased structural expressions (PBSE), a novel metadata representation that offers conciseness and maintainability advantages and is reusable. To apply PBSE to enterprise applications, we translate PBSE specifications to Java annotations, with annotating classes automatically as an intermediate build step. We demonstrate the advantages of the new metadata format by assessing its conciseness and reusability, as compared to XML and annotations, in the task of expressing metadata of J2EE reference applications and a mid-size, commercial, enterprise application.

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