Towards dynamic plug-in replacement in Eclipse plug-in development

Gregersen, Allan Raundahl; Jôrgensen, Bo Nørregaard

doi:10.1145/1328279.1328288

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…For example, Kramer and Magee propose a three‐tiered architectural model to develop a self‐managed software system that automatically reconfigures system components to reach a high‐level goal. Other authors focus on dynamic updates and dynamic component discovery , thus allowing users to improve the system with features provided by third parties; they do not provide feature integration support as MASH does.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

MASH: tool integration made easy

Mariani

Pastore

2012

Softw Pract Exp

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SUMMARYIntegrating tools implemented as plug-ins is a complex and time-consuming activity that requires good programming skills and a deep understanding of the underlying plug-in architecture for successful completion. Even when tools are implemented as plug-ins for a same integrated development environment (IDE), users frequently prefer to manually perform the same inefficient operations every time they use the tools rather than implementing automated tool integration.In our vision, IDE users must be able to flexibly execute plug-ins and easily integrate their results by designing workflows that can be persisted, automatically executed, and reused in other workflows.This paper therefore presents MASH, a framework that extends IDEs with task-based plug-ins (TBplug-ins) and workflows. A TB-plug-in is a plug-in that exposes its functionalities as executable tasks in a workflow. TB-plug-in workflows are processes that automatically execute multiple tools and integrate their results. IDE users can turn regular plug-ins into TB-plug-ins by writing simple scripts or using the GUI capturing feature that MASH offers.We validated our idea with two case studies examining the design of two data-driven analyses as tool integration. We discovered that workflows can be easily designed by knowing little about the IDE or plug-ins API, saving significant effort otherwise devoted to implementing additional plug-ins and glue code, and they produce analyses that can be quickly modified and reused.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

MASH: tool integration made easy

Mariani

Pastore

2012

Softw Pract Exp

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Dynamic update of Java applications—balancing change flexibility vs programming transparency

Gregersen

Jôrgensen

2009

J. Softw. Maint. Evol.: Res. Pract.

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The ability to dynamically change the behavior of an application is becoming an important issue in contemporary rich client software development. Not only can programmers benefit from dynamic updates during the development of concurrent applications where recreation of complex application states can be avoided during test and debugging but also at post‐deployment time where applications can be updated transparently without going through the well‐known halt, redeploy and restart scheme. In this paper, we explain how our dynamic update framework achieves transparent dynamic updates of running Java applications while guaranteeing both type and thread safety. A novel feature of our approach is that it supports full redefinition of classes by allowing changes to the type hierarchy. Our approach is based on a lightweight runtime system, which is injected into an application via bytecode transformations at class loading. We show how our approach can add dynamic update capabilities to rich client development by integrating it with the NetBeans rich client platform. Performance experiments on our NetBeans implementation show that the overhead of our approach is low when applied to component application programming interface classes. To the best of our knowledge no other existing approach achieves the same level of low overhead and programming transparency. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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