Specifying Downloadable Properties for Reusing Software Components : A Case Study of Java

In this paper, we propose a specification of software components which can be loaded not only from your local system but also from the other systems over the computer network. Because components from the other system are not always enough reliable or safe to act freely in your own system, you should limit their activities to a certain context. Because some existing systems like Java RMI and an Applet provide a mechanism for such limitation implicitly, users sometimes lose sight of the abilities and limitations of such components. Therefore, they fail to reuse the components in the right way. We provide a way to specify such properties, so that component users can precisely understand the abilities and limitations.