Supporting Tools for Designing-By-Contract in Component based Applications

Abstract. This paper deals with the modeling and the automatic implementation of constraints in component based applications. Constraints have been assuming an ever more relevant role in modeling distributed systems as long as business rules implementation, design-by-contract practice, and faulttolerance requirements are concerned. Nevertheless, component developers are not sufficiently supported by existing tools to model and implement such features. In this paper, we propose a set of tools that enable developers both to model component constraints and to automatically generate component skeletons that already implement such constraints. 1