Re: Cadena

From: Jonathan Aldrich (jonal@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 15 2002 - 23:19:25 PDT

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    > John Hatcliff has been working on support for lightweight formal methods
    > for component-based systems. His Cadena system includes some language
    > features that look very much like architectural descriptions in ArchJava:
    >
    > http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~hatcliff/Papers/cadena.pdf

    Thanks for the pointer, Keunwoo! This looks like really interesting work
    to me (although I don't know the field well enough to know if it's novel).

    A short summary: Cadena supports the development of real-time systems
    based on an architecture built out of CORBA components. Their focus on
    real-time systems allows them to do sophisticated analyses of system
    architectures, including dependance analysis, temporal property checking,
    and domain-specific analyses like real time scheduling.

    Compared to ArchJava, this system has different (and complementary) goals.
    ArchJava limits itself to one language and VM (for now) but gains the
    ability to support very flexible implementation styles while guaranteeing
    that the implementation conforms to the declared architectural structure.
    While Cadena is cross-language and cross-platform, it supports much more
    restricted architectures and implementation styles compared to ArchJava,
    it doesn't guarantee conformance between architecture and implementation,
    and it focus on only one particular domain. However, accepting these
    restrictions gives them leverage to reason about a lot of interesting
    design-level properties, as mentioned above.

    I'd like to learn more about the problems of component-based development
    (as distinct from software architecture) and current research in that
    field. It's obviously a very hot topic in industry (with CORBA, COM,
    JavaBeans, etc.) and there are a lot of related industrial tools, but I
    don't understand very well what concrete benefits these systems provide,
    other than a nice, standard middleware library. Is there research that
    shows how component-based systems can provide concrete properties that are
    otherwise hard to guarantee? What are the software engineering benefits
    of a component model, and what are the outstanding software engineering
    problems in component-based software development?

    This paper seems to represent at least one interesting point in that
    space. I heard that Matthew Dwyer (a co-author of this paper) might be
    visiting UW next week, so maybe we can talk with him.

    Jonathan :-)

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