Automatic Implementation of Constraints in Component Based Applications

Component-based software architectures have become one of the predominant solutions in the software technologies scenario. As well, constraints have been assuming an ever more relevant role in modeling distributed systems as long as business rules implementation, designby- contract practice, and fault-tolerance requirements are concerned. Nevertheless, component developers are not sufficiently supported by existing tools to implement these features. We address such a deficiency and we propose some implementation patterns to translate constraint models into source code and two automatic tools: the Component Constraint Modeler (CoCoMod) and the Component Constraint Generator (CoCoGen). CoCoMod enables designers to specify both component interfaces and constraints as visual UML models and automatically generates textual models for interfaces and constraints. CoCoGen executes the implementation patters to translate constraint models into source code. A simple case study is presented in order to show an application of the proposed approach.