Transparency of Adaptation

As discussed in section the proposed methodology does not offer total transparency to the application.

Adaptors hide adaptation up to certain limit, but there are still two aspects affecting the application:

• deployment of adaptors
• changed semantics of method invocations

Though the adaptor concept is a means to enhance transparency, the adaptors themselves lead to a different way of programming than needed for static customization.

Invocation of adaptable methods differs from ordinary local method calls, because an invocation of an adaptable method involves a selection of an implementation class requiring communication over the network with the repository. This implies two additional exceptions: The communication with the repository may fail due to a network error and the selection of an implementation class may fail because of a missing suitable implementation class for the current environment. These exceptional cases are mapped to one exception corresponding to the generic Java class not found exception .