A Reflective Approach to Design Component-Based Distributed Real-Time Applications

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) has been proven effective in the development and management of distributed software systems, and component model is the foundation of this approach. Currently, some challenges appear when building time-critical applications for the distributed systems based on current component models. The issues remain that component models themselves haven’t undertaken the two key characteristics of distributed real-time systems: timing properties and dynamic properties. As a result, component-based distributed systems with timing constraints need to handle the non-functional requirements additionally and cannot benefit from the CBSE any further. To solve the issues and facilitate the development of distributed real-time applications in client-server computing pattern, a reflective approach to design component-based distributed real-time applications is presented in this paper. The reflective design specifies the component’s business logic and its timing-constraint characteristics, opens the component’s inner realization and carries out separation of concerns between functionality and non-functionality during design and run time. To validate this design approach, an examples is performed. Experimental results show that an application’s timing properties have been met by the components themselves by adopting this design approach.

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