Implementing Contract-based Software Architectures in Java: The Structural, Behavioural, and Interaction Design Decisions

Architectural languages (ALs) have been so actively researched since the nineties and this leads to many ALs with different capabilities that have been proposed each day. However, most of the ALs ignore the specifications of the structural, behavioural, and interaction design decisions and do not support their analysis and development. The ALs that do support suffer from the process algebra based notation sets that practitioners do not prefer to work with. This issue is tackled in the paper by extending the Design-by-Contract based architectural language called XCD that supports the contractual specifications of the structural, behavioural, and interaction design decisions about software systems and their formal analysis. XCD is extended with a development support in Java so as to transform the contractual specifications in XCD into a complete Java program that considers all the structural, behavioural, and interaction decisions specified. So, practitioners will be able to specify non-algebraic, contractual specifications in XCD, formally analyse them, and produce the Java source-code that reflects the specified architecture completely and consistently. The produced Java code can also be tested for incompleteness and wrong use of component services automatically.