Automated Model-Based Configuration of Enterprise Java Applications

The decentralized process of configuring enterprise applications is complex and error-prone, involving multiple participants/roles and numerous configuration changes across multiple files, application server settings, and database decisions. This paper describes an approach to automated enterprise application configuration that uses a feature model, executes a series of probes to verify configuration properties, formalizes feature selection as a constraint satisfaction problem, and applies constraint logic programming techniques to derive a correct application configuration. To validate the approach, the authors developed a configuration engine, called Fresh, for enterprise Java applications and conducted experiments to measure how effectively Fresh can configure the canonical Java Pet Store application.