Georgios Koutsoukos

Tool support for coordination-based software evolution

In todays global and highly competitive business environments, organisations are replying to the question of whether technology is forming business or vice versa by integrating their business and IT strategies, thus using technology to do business. As a consequence, there is an increasing pressure to build software systems that are able to cope with the new requirements imposed by both technological advances and different business rules. At the same time, it is now widely accepted that, although object-oriented techniques have provided useful tools for software construction, their support cannot be extended directly to evolution. Even worse, it is becoming evident that there is a lack of theoretical principles and accompanying practical tools that can effectively support software evolution. In this paper, we describe in detail a development tool that is based on sound mathematical principles and supports an architecture-based approach to evolution centred on the notion of a coordination contract - a modelling primitive that treats components as black boxes and is compositional with respect to change.

Forms2Net – migrating oracle forms to microsoft .NET

Forms2Net is an ATX Software commercial reengineering tool that automatically converts Oracle Forms applications to the equivalent .NET (C#) ones, with approximately 75% rate of automatic conversion. From the reengineering and transformation theoretical viewpoint, Forms2Net falls in the general category of language-platform conversion tools. As theory and practice indicate, for such tools to be effective, there are two major issues that must be handled: (a) the resolution of the semantic gap between the pair of source-target languages and (b) the resolution of the dependencies (e.g., API dependencies) on functionalities provided by default by the source platform or on programming idiosyncrasies of the source platform (in this case Oracle Forms). This paper presents the important practical aspects of Forms2Net and the underlying technology. We discuss the semantic gap between Oracle Forms and .NET forms and the design principles and solution strategies used to bridge this gap.

Managing Evolution in Telecommunication Systems

Recent advances in telecommunication technology, including wireless networks and the Internet, along with the competition of network operators for offering advanced and different services, are putting increasing pressure for building telecommunication software systems that are adaptive to new requirements and easily reconfigurable, even in run time. We propose a new modelling primitive - coordination contract - that we have developed and applied to other applications domains, as a means to provide an effective solution to this problem. We briefly describe coordination contracts and discuss how they can support the evolution of the specifications of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Datagram layer.

The Coordination Development Environment

Coordination contracts [1][2] are a modelling primitive, based on methodological and mathematical principles [8],[3], that facilitates the evolution of software systems. The use of coordination contracts encourages the separation of computation from coordination aspects, and the analysis of which are the “stable” and “unstable” entities of the system regarding evolution. Coordination contracts encapsulate the coordination aspects, i.e., the way components interact, and as such may capture the business rules [7] or the protocols [6] that govern interactions within the application and between the application and its environment.

Enhancing Dependability Through Flexible Adaptation to Changing Requirements

This paper describes an architectural approach that facilitates the dynamic adaptation of systems to changing domain rules. The approach relies on “coordination contracts”, a modelling and implementation primitive we have developed for run-time reconfiguration. Our framework includes an engine that, whenever a service is called, checks the domain rules that are applicable and configures the response of the service before proceeding with the call.

Developing and evolving Java applications using coordination contracts

Jo~.o Gouveia 1, Georgios Koutsoukos 1, Michel Wermelinger 1,2, Lu[s Andrade 1, Jose Luiz Fiadeiro 1,3 1ATX Software SA, Alameda Ant6nio Sergio 7, 1C, 2795-023 Linda-a-Velha, Portugal 2Dep. de Informatica, Univ. Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal aDep. de Informfitica, Fac. de Ciencias, Univ. de Lisboa, Campo Grande, 1700 Lisboa, Portugal {landrade, jgouveia, gkoutsoukos} @ atxsoftware.com jose @fiadeiro.org mw@di.fct.unl.pt

Coordination contracts for Java applications

Summary form only given. The authors consider coordination contracts, a modelling primitive based on methodological and mathematical principles, that facilitates the evolution of software systems. Coordination contracts encapsulate the coordination aspects, i.e., the way components interact, and as such may capture the business rules or the protocols that govern interactions within the application and between the application and its environment. For this approach to be usable in real applications, it requires a tool to support system development and evolution using coordination contracts. The Coordination Development Environment (CDE) helps programmers to develop Java applications using coordination contracts.