Automatic synthesis of deadlock free connectors for COM/DCOM applications

ABSTRACT

Many software projects are based on the integration of independently designed software components that are acquired on the market rather than developed within the project itself. Sometimes interoperability and composition mechanisms provided by component based integration frameworks cannot solve the problem of binary component integration in an automatic way. Notably, in the context of component based concurrent systems, the binary component integration may cause deadlocks within the system. In this paper we present a technique to allow connectors synthesis for deadlock-free component based architectures [2] in a real scale context, namely in the context of COM/DCOM applications. This technique is based on an architectural, connector-based approach which consists of synthesizing a COM/DCOM connector as a COM/DCOM server that can route requests of the clients through a deadlock free policy. This work also provides guide lines to implement an automatic tool that derives the implementation of routing dead-lock-free policy within the connector from the dynamic behavior specification of the COM components. It is then possible to avoid the deadlock by using COM composition mechanisms to insert the synthesized connector within the system while letting the system COM servers unimodified. We present a sucessful application of this technique on the (COM version of the) problem known as "The dining philosophers". Depending on the type of deadlock we have a strategy that automatically operates on the connector part of the system architecture in order to obtain a suitably equivalent version of the system which is deadlock-free.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Modules and interfaces

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.12 Interoperability

General Terms:
Design, Reliability