Defining and Checking Deployment Contracts for Software Components

Kung-Kiu Lau and Vladyslav Ukis
School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
{kung-kiu,vukis}@cs.man.ac.uk

Abstract:

Ideally in the deployment phase, components should be composable, and
their composition checked. Current component models fall short of 
this ideal. Most models do not allow composition in the deployment phase.
Moreover, current models use only deployment descriptors as 
deployment contracts. These descriptors are not ideal contracts. 
For one thing, they are only for specific containers, rather than
arbitrary execution environments. In any case,  they are
checked only at runtime, not deployment time. In this paper we present
an approach to component deployment which not only defines better 
contracts but also checks them in the deployment phase.