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A contract-based approach to describe and deploy non-functional adaptations in software architectures

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Societyvolume 10, pages5–20 (2004) | Download Citation

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Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive approach to describe, deploy and adapt component-based applications having dynamic non-functional requirements. The approach is centered on high-level contracts associated to architectural descriptions, which allow the non-functional requirements to be handled separately during the system, design process. This helps to achieve separation of concerns facilitating the reuse of modules that implement the application in other systems. Besides specifying non-functional requirements, contracts are used at runtime to guide configuration adaptations required to enforce these requirements. The infrastructure required to manage the contracts follows an architectural pattern, which can be directly mapped to specific components included in a supporting reflective middleware. This allows designers to write a contract and to follow standard recipes to insert the extra code required to its enforcement in the supporting middleware.

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Affiliations

  1. Institute de Computação, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), CEP 24210-240, Niterói, RJ, Brasil

    • Orlando Loques
    • , Romulo Curty
    •  & Sidney Ansaloni

  2. Instituto de Matemática e Estatística, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), CEP 20559-900, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil

    • Alexandre Sztajnberg

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Keywords

  • contracts
  • non-functional requirements
  • software architectures
  • dynamic configuration adaptation
  • separation of concerns
  • middleware