Persistence: the software evolution point of view

Overview

Most object-oriented applications need to store objects for later use. This is fine, until classes evolve. Suddenly previously stored objects may not be retrievable anymore if their classes have changed. The standard way to handle this issue is to provide conversion functions containing initialization code intended to re-establish the class invariant. We want to improve the way schema evolution is handled in persistent object-oriented applications. A first outcome is the ESCHER tool, integrated into EVE, the existing Eiffel Verification Environment. The tool handles class versions, generates conversion functions templates and provides a retrieval algorithm to ensure an invariant-safe class evolution.

Download

ESCHER is part of the Eiffel Verification Environment repository (EVE), and the source code is available.

Project members

• Marco Piccioni
• Bertrand Meyer

Publications

• Marco Piccioni, Manuel Oriol, Bertrand Meyer Schema Evolution for Persistent Object-Oriented Software: Model, Empirical Study, and Automated Support. Submitted to IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering (TSE), February 2011 [arxiv]

• Marco Piccioni, Manuel Oriol, Bertrand Meyer, Teseo Schneider An IDE-based, integrated solution to Schema Evolution of Object-Oriented Software. ASE 2009: 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automatic Software Engineering, (Auckland, New Zealand), November 2009 [pdf]

• Marco Piccioni, Manuel Oriol, Bertrand Meyer: IDE-integrated Support for Schema Evolution in Object-Oriented Applications. RAM-SE 2007: 4th ECOOP'2007 Workshop on Reflection, AOP and Meta-Data for Software Evolution, (Berlin, Germany), August 2007 [pdf]