Fresco: Flexible and Reliable Evolution System for Components

Fresco is a methodology that allows for the dynamic adaptation of component-oriented applications. Fresco aims to support the developer in the realization of dynamic adaptation throughout the entire life cycle of a component. At design time, a tool (DeepCompare) assists the programmer in the preparation of a component with live update functionality. At runtime, a middleware environment called Draco guides the replacement process itself and ensures that a component replacement is executed correctly.In this position paper, the focus is on the design time support and the tool DeepCompare. After the functional development of a component, DeepCompare constructs a meta-model from both the old and the new component versions. These models are compared and equivalent data-structures are identified. This information is subsequently used to partially generate state transition functions. Possible benefits include the verification of the correctness of an update using component invariants and the estimation of the complexity of the upgrade in order to flag certain problem scenarios to the developer