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A systematic approach for structuring exception handling in robust component-based software

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 10, pages 3–17 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

Component-based development (CBD) is recognized today as the standard paradigm for structuring large software systems. However, the most popular component models and component-based development processes provide little guidance on how to systematically incorporate exception handling into component-based systems. The problem of how to employ language-level exception handling mechanisms to introduce redundancy in componentbased systems is recognized by CBD practitioners as very difficult and often not adequately solved. As a consequence, the implementation of the redundant exceptional behaviour causes a negative impact, instead of a positive one, on system and maintainability. In this paper, we propose an approach for the construction of dependable component-based systems that integrates two complementary strategies: (i) a global exception handling strategy for inter-component composition and (ii) a local exception handling strategy for dealing with errors in reusable components. A case study illustrates the application of our approach to a real software system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computing - State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), P.O. Box 6176, CEP 13084-971, Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Fernando Castor Filho, Paulo Asterio de C. Guerra, Vinicius Asta Pagano & Cecília Mary F. Rubira

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  1. Fernando Castor Filho
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  2. Paulo Asterio de C. Guerra
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  3. Vinicius Asta Pagano
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  4. Cecília Mary F. Rubira
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Filho, F.C., Guerra, P.A.d.C., Pagano, V.A. et al. A systematic approach for structuring exception handling in robust component-based software. J Braz Comp Soc 10, 3–17 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192362

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Keywords

  • Exceptional behaviour
  • Fault-tolerant component
  • Software fault tolerance
  • Component-based
  • development