Retrofitting networked applications to add autonomic reconfiguration
Michael G. Merideth, Priya Lakshmi Narasimhan · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2005
To reduce user maintenance is an important goal for applications that must dynamically adapt based on their environments. There are many existing popular applications that lack support for this autonomic reconfiguration, but that are beginning to be used in these dynamic environments, in which they must update themselves frequently; not all of these applications will be completely redesigned and redeveloped in order to support autonomic features. In this paper, we explore how to retrofit pre-existing networked applications to add support for autonomic reconfiguration. To illustrate our methods, we retrofit a popular open-source intrusion detection system, Snort , to enable it to reconfigure itself using online program updates and information about its environment.