  Runtime reconfiguration is a fundamental requirement of many
telecommunication applications which also has been addressed by management
standards like CMIP, 3GPP TS 32.602, and NETCONF. Two basic commands considered
by these standards are CREATE and DELETE which operate on managed objects
inside an application. The available configuration management technologies,
like JMX, OSGi, and Fractal, do not support the CREATE and DELETE
reconfiguration commands of the telecommunication standards. In this paper, we
introduce a novel technology, called RSCM, for development of runtime
reconfigurable applications complying with the telecommunication standards. The
RSCM subagent takes the responsibility of loading the application from the
configuration file, executing the runtime reconfiguration commands (including
CREATE and DELETE), enforcing validity of the configuration state, and updating
the configuration file according to the latest reconfiguration commands. We
exploit the modular and object oriented features of the XML technology for
storing the configuration state of a program in a configuration file. The
software development process is tailored such that the design of XML schemas of
managed classes is performed parallel to the design of software classes. In
addition, a novel programming approach based on indirect referencing is
proposed which allows safe and almost immediate deletion of managed objects at
runtime. This indirect referencing mechanism affects the implementation of
associations in class diagrams and prevents methods of a class to use the this
pointer freely. The RSCM technology has been successfully used in several
commercial telecommunication applications; including an SMS service center, an
SMS gateway, and an SMS hub.
