Enabling Flexible Cross-Version Interoperability for Distributed Services

Annotation: Describes how to use mappers to enable cross-version interoperation during distributed upgrades. Argues that this interrupts service less than systems that atomically upgrade all clients and servers that use a changing interface. Describes a UI that guides the evolver (upgrader) through automatic generation of mapper (simulation) code. Restricts autogenerated wrappers to 1-to-1 mapping from old method calls to new ones (in general, the wrapper could call multiple methods on many different servers). Categorizes the supported kinds of interface evolution, including subtyping. Also discusses chains of mappers, backwards mappers (new-to-old), propagation of supertype changes to subtypes, and optimizations (like deprecating old mappers).

BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{senivongse99enabling,
   author = {Twittie Senivongse},
   title = {Enabling Flexible Cross-Version Interoperability for
	Distributed Services},
   booktitle = {Intl. Symposium on Dist. Objects and Applications},
   address = {Edinburgh, UK},
   year = {1999}
}