Building trust in third-party components using component wrappers in the .NET frameworks

Authors:
Christine A. Mingins;Chee Y. Chan
Affiliations:
Monash University, Caulfield East 3145, VIC, Australia;Monash University, Caulfield East 3145, VIC, Australia
Venue:
CRPIT '02 Proceedings of the Fortieth International Conference on Tools Pacific: Objects for internet, mobile and embedded applications
Year:
2002

Citing 5
Cited 1

Proc. of a discussion meeting of the Royal Society of London on Mathematical logic and programming languages

Proc. of a discussion meeting of the Royal Society of London on Mathematical logic and programming languages
Object-oriented software construction (2nd ed.)

Object-oriented software construction (2nd ed.)
Wrappers to the Rescue

ECCOP '98 Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming
iContract - The Java(tm) Design by Contract(tm) Tool

TOOLS '98 Proceedings of the Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems
Contracts: From Analysis to C++ Implementation

TOOLS '99 Proceedings of the Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems

Intrusion detection aware component-based systems: A specification-based framework

Journal of Systems and Software

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Software purchasers are often provided with very sparse information about how to correctly deploy software components. We describe a novel contract-based approach to building trust in third party components. In contrast to the usual approach where contracts specifying the software semantics are constructed at the time of source code generation, we retrofit existing components with Contract wrappers. Sets of client requirements on the component are expressed in terms of software contracts using the Design by Contract™ method. The targeted component is then wrapped in this executable specification. Subsequent calls to the component are made via the wrapper. Any client misunderstanding about the component's functionality will be picked up as contract violations. Contract wrappers also serve as the basis for test suites for integrating components into applications, and as documentation for future updates.We demonstrate how such contract wrappers can be constructed and deployed using the cross-language metadata capabilities available in Microsoft's new .NET Framework.