Dynamic updation of JCA based resource adapter connection factory properties

Resource adapter is connector software that can be deployed in application servers so that an enterprise application can connect to a backend enterprise information system (EIS) in a seamless manner. Typically resource adapters conform to JCA (J2EE Connector Architecture) specification, and plug into application servers to provide connectivity between the EIS and the enterprise applications. A resource adapter uses a set of configurable properties defined in the deployment descriptor (ra.xml) of the adapter. This deployment descriptor contains various EIS specific configurable properties apart from the product and version information. In the current implementation, these properties are specified while deploying the resource adapter and cannot be changed during runtime. If any property needs to be changed, the resource adapter needs to be redeployed and the application server has to be restarted so that the new property value can take effect. Restarting application servers is an expensive operation, as several enterprise applications lose their availability. This limitation results in a considerable downtime for users in a production environment. In this paper we describe our solution to overcome this limitation.