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Deriving Interface Contracts for Distributed Services

Authors:
Bernhard Hollunder

Keywords: Interface Contracts for distributed services; Design by contract; WCF; Web services; WS-Policy

Abstract:
Software components should be equipped with well-defined interfaces. With design by contract, there is a prominent principle for specifying preconditions and postconditions for methods as well as invariants for classes. Although design by contract has been recognized as a powerful vehicle for improving software quality, modern programming languages such as Java and C# did not support it from the beginning. In the meanwhile, several language extensions have been proposed such as Contracts for Java, Java Modeling Language, as well as Code Contracts for .NET. In this paper, we present an approach that brings design by contract to distributed services. To be precise, contracts included in the implementation of a Web service will be automatically extracted and translated into a socalled contract policy, which will be part of the service’s WSDL. Our solution also covers the generation of contract-aware proxy objects to enforce the contract policy already on client side. The feasibility of our approach has been demonstrated for .NET/WCF services and for Java based Web Services.

Pages: 69 to 75

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: September 25, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3549

ISBN: 978-1-61208-152-6

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from September 25, 2011 to September 30, 2011