Programming by Contract in a Distributed Object Environment

Although the representation of preconditions and postconditions in a non-distributed environment is clear and relatively well established, the pragmatic requirements of a distributed environment introduce some complication to the traditional implementation of programming by contract (PBC)[10]. In this paper we discuss and review the common definition of an object interface in relation to distributed environment and encapsulation. We go on to describe an implementation approach of PBC for a distributed environment which is more effective in checking the interface constraints occurring in a distributed setting whilst limiting the publicly available methods to only those required. Introduction Reliability can be introduced into a system in many forms; one common technique is through the use of software fault tolerance[6]. Software fault tolerance itself incorporates many methods, including, in object oriented systems, programming by contract (PBC). The basic idea of PBC is to use assert..