Healing Web applications through automatic workarounds

We develop the notion of automatic workaround in the context of Web applications. A workaround is a sequence of operations, applied to a failing component, that is equivalent to the failing sequence in terms of its intended effect, but that does not result in a failure. We argue that workarounds exi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal on software tools for technology transfer 2008-12, Vol.10 (6), p.493-502
Main Authors: Carzaniga, Antonio, Gorla, Alessandra, Pezzè, Mauro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Computer Science
Computer science
control theory
systems
Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface
Exact sciences and technology
Fault tolerance
Software
Software Engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Special Section WQVV 07
Theory of Computation
Web services
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Summary:We develop the notion of automatic workaround in the context of Web applications. A workaround is a sequence of operations, applied to a failing component, that is equivalent to the failing sequence in terms of its intended effect, but that does not result in a failure. We argue that workarounds exist in modular systems because components often offer redundant interfaces and implementations, which in turn admit several equivalent sequences of operations. In this paper, we focus on Web applications because these are good and relevant examples of component-based (or service-oriented) applications. Web applications also have attractive technical properties that make them particularly amenable to the deployment of automatic workarounds. We propose an architecture where a self-healing proxy applies automatic workarounds to a Web application server. We also propose a method to generate equivalent sequences and to represent and select them at run-time as automatic workarounds. We validate the proposed architecture in four case studies in which we deploy automatic workarounds to handle four known failures in to the popular Flickr and Google Maps Web applications.
ISSN:1433-2779
1433-2787
DOI:10.1007/s10009-008-0088-8