Towards a “Good” Functional and Executable Behavior Model

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to present the more important features of a behavior model intended for the specification and the validation of distributed applications or distributed application components. Distributed application components are the basic building blocks that are directly useful for the procurement of working distributed applications, e.g. telecommunication management network (TMN) applications, electronic commerce applications. . . . Such distributed application components are typically built on top of distributed object computing (DOC) systems that basically provide the communication infrastructure. Among the existing DOC systems we are particularly interested in the OSI Systems Management (OSI-SM) framework [13] typically used for TMN applications and the general purpose OMG-CORBA [12] DOC system. There is an important requirement for a better specification of distributed application components. Indeed, without a precise, unambiguous and correct specifications it is difficult to build a truly interworking distributed application. To this end, it is necessary to go far beyond the communication infrastructure for which a reasonable level of maturity is available. The challenge is to provide effective specification and validation frameworks for application oriented issues, e.g. what is the meaning or semantics of each interaction occurring between a client and a server. As a matter of fact, organizations such as the network management forum (NMF) and the OMG have proposed new concepts to allow the standardization of application oriented issues. In the NMF we have Ensembles [11], in the OMG we have Object Frameworks [17].