Applying Deployment Contracts to Components from Component Repositories

K.-K. Lau and V. Ukis
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL, UK
kung-kiu,vu@cs.man.ac.uk

Abstract:

Currently, components in component repositories are described
verbally. System developers choose components for their systems by
looking at the verbal component description. In this report, we try to
build an email client system using this approach. We take components
from three component repositories and compose them. Following this, we
run the system in desktop and web execution environments [7, 8] and
discover runtime conflicts with the components. We then apply
deployment contracts [5, 4, 6] to the components and perform a
deployment contracts analysis at component deployment time that
discovers the conflicts before runtime. This leads us to the
conclusion that components with deployment contracts are better suited
for component repositories since deployment contracts analysis can
pre-empt runtime conflicts even before the components are
composed. That is, system developers can save time and effort when
composing such components.