Formal design and implementation of constraints in software components

This paper deals with the modeling, automatic implementation and runtime verification of constraints in component-based applications. Constraints have been assuming an ever more relevant role in modeling distributed systems as long as business rules implementation, design-by-contract practice, and fault-tolerance requirements are concerned. Nevertheless, component developers are not sufficiently supported by existing tools to model and implement such features.In this paper, we propose a methodology and a set of tools that enable developers both to model component constraints and to generate automatically component skeletons that already implement such constraints. The methodology has been extended to support implementation even in case of legacy components.