Specification and Dynamic Checking of Composition Constraints in Distributed Component-Based Systems.

摘要

Component-based software engineering has been a dream for at least 30 years, beginning with Doug McIlroy's seminal presentation at the 1968 NATO conference in Garmisch. The dream is rapidly becoming a reality with the advent of component interoperability standards such as ActiveX and JavaBeans, and middleware infrastructures such as NET, DCOM, and CORBA. Both civilian and military software development efforts stand to reap enormous benefits from this technology, in terms of reduced time-to-deployment, reduced development costs, increased productivity, and increased tolerance for complexity. While existing component technologies provide the basic building blocks for a component-based style of development, they still lack the fundamental mechanisms needed to ensure that systems are composed in a manner that ensures the integrity of component interactions. This research has been dedicated to investigating such fundamental mechanisms, In particular, the research has created mechanisms for specifying and checking component compositions in distributed component-based software systems. The research was conducted along two avenues: developing architectural foundations for developing component-based software; and exploiting and extending component standards to support constraint checking. The results of these two avenues of research are described further below. The authors first briefly discuss each of the two research avenues and the projects that have resulted from pursuing these they list the significant results achieved by each of the project. The publications that have been produced by this research are listed fully in Section 4.