Architecture based deployment of large-scale component based systems: The tool and principles

Abstract

After a component based system is developed, it has to be deployed into a target environment. As the system becomes much larger and more complex and the environment becomes open and dynamic, the deployment comes to be a difficult, tiring, error-prone and time-consuming task. This paper proposes an architecture based approach to deploying large-scale component based systems into open and dynamic environments in a systematic and semi-automatic manner. It does four contributions to facilitate the deployment: Firstly, a supporting tool is developed to visualize the software architecture of the system to be deployed to help deployers understand the structure, functions and desired qualities of the system. Secondly, the tool can automatically generate the deployment information from the architecture description produced in the phase of design and this will relieve deployers of inputting hundreds or thousands of deployment elements manually. Thirdly, the tool can monitor the up-to-date resource consumptions of the machines and support to partition one system into several subsystems and deploy the subsystems onto multiple machines simultaneously. Fourthly, a set of principles are proposed for guiding the deployment with the tool. The approach, especially the tool and principles are demonstrated on J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.