An evaluation of the adaptation capabilities in programming languages

In recent years the need for software applications to adapt to the environment in which they are situated has become common. Beside architectural approaches, language-level support for the development of adaptable and context-aware software have been investigated. Many existing solutions adopt ad hoc programming paradigms such as aspect oriented programming (AOP) or context oriented programming (COP). In this paper we investigate the use of the abstractions offered by traditional object-oriented and functional paradigms for the development of context-adaptable systems. We carry out our analysis along a set of conceptual directions which consider the requirement of functional adaptation beside non functional requirements such as safety and effective modularization. Our analysis were validated though the development of several prototypes of an adaptable cache server which is chosen as the running example through the paper. We provide an estimation of the performance advantages of the techniques based traditional programming languages compared with context-oriented programming.