Formal specifications in component-based development

Abstract

Software engineering has entered a new era, the Internet and its associated technologies require a different conceptual framework for building and understanding software solutions. Users ask to develop applications more rapidly, and software engineers need to ensamble systems from preexisting parts. Components and Components-Based Development( CBD), are the approaches that provide solutions to these arising needs. Components are the way to encapsulate existing functionality, acquire third-party solutions, and build new services to support emerging business processes. Component-based development provides a design paradigm that is well suited to the new requirements, were the traditional design and build has been replaced by select and integrate. Within this approach, the specification of components plays a crucial role. If we are working on the development of components in order to construct a library for general use, we need to start from a concrete and complete specification of what we are going to construct. If we are assembling our application from pre-existing components, we need a precise specification of the behaviour of the component in order to select it from the library.