Towards a Well Structured and Dynamic Application Server

In recent years, Java enterprise edition (Java EE) technologies keep expanding with more and more features. The customization of application server is becoming multifarious owing to different environments and domains. And delivering a continuous evolving application server is more frequent and costly. However, current application servers cannot meet such requirements, due to their inexplicit module boundary, insufficient lifecycle management and relatively absent dependency management. In this paper, we propose an approach to make an application server well structured and dynamic. Guided by this approach, we implemented a prototype, namely PKUAS II. The evaluations show that a flexible, customizable and dynamic application server can be developed without an adverse effect on the performance.