A refactoring based approach to support binary backward compatible framework upgrades [Elektronische Ressource] / eingereicht von Ilie Şavga

A Refactoring-Based Approach to SupportBinary Backward-CompatibleFramework UpgradesDissertationzur Erlangung des akademischen GradesDoktoringenieur (Dr.-Ing.)vorgelegt an derTechnischen Universität DresdenFakultät Informatikeingereicht vonM.Sc. Ilie Sa¸ vgageboren am 02.02.1975 in Chisin¸ au,˘ Republik MoldauGutachter:Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Uwe Aßmann (Technische Universität Dresden)Prof. Dr. Friedrich Steimann (Fernuniversität in Hagen)Tag der Verteidigung: Dresden, den 21 April 2010Dresden, den 16 Juni 2009c Copyright 2009, Ilie Sa¸ vga. All rights reserved.To my parents and wife, for their endless love and supportAbstractA successful software framework—a software component encompassing reusable design decisions for afamily of related applications—usually has to evolve considerably due to new or changed requirements,or quality improvements. Although the Application Programming Interface (API) of a framework shouldstay stable, in practice it often changes during framework evolution. When upgrading the frameworkto a new, improved version, such may invalidate plugins—modules that instantiated one of theprevious framework versions into a final application. Such application-breaking API changes are backward-incompatible with existing plugins: plugin sources cannot be recompiled, or plugin binaries cannot belinked and run with a new framework release.