Construction and Reconfiguration of a Component-Based Embedded JVM

Component software is a method to deal with the complexity of software structures and configurations. Despite the increase of complexity in systems software such as operating systems and virtual machines, most of such software is configured under a traditional way i.e. C preprocessor directives. This paper explores a component software tool. The authors modularize an implementation of Java virtual machine with a component description language, called Knit. They show the difference between the original implementation and the modularized one. The modularization introduces little overhead despite the clearer view of its architecture. Three case studies on reconfiguration of the JVM implementation show the benefits and problems of current component software technology.