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, we
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. Our
results show that Fresh reduces the number of lines of hand written
XML code by up to 92% and the total number of configuration steps by
up to 72%.