Automatic component protocol adaptation with the CoConut/J tool suite

Abstract

While industrial middleware platforms such as CORBA, EJB, or .NET facilitate the development of distributed applications by providing certain infra-structural services required in many distributed systems (such as name services, remote method calls, parameter marshalling, etc.), these industrial platforms fail to support the development of distributed systems with independent components. In particular, their component models do not provide sufficient information for component interoperability checks or automated component adaptation. Especially when considering the personal and institutional separation between component developer and component vendor as one of the prerequisites of an independent component market, finding automatically as many component interoperability errors as possible is crucial. Hence, it is of practical concern that component interfaces not only model the correct way of calling the single methods but also the valid sequences of method calls. Likewise, practice clearly shows that component reuse usually requires component adaptation. This directly shows that only detecting incompatibilities is of limited use, but advocates for techniques of automated component adaptation.In this paper we describe algorithms and tools for specifying and analysing component interfaces in order to check interoperability and to generate adapted component interfaces automatically. Therefore, we introduce the concept of parameterised contracts and a new component interface model.