Adding Business Rules and Constraints in Component Based Applications

Models have demonstrated to be the most efficient tool to formalize system properties that have to be developed. Currently, designers are able to accurately specify high-level as well as low-level system details by means of visual UML models. In the case of component based applications, after having produced UML visual models, designers have to describe component interfaces. This task is accomplished by means of the standard Interface Definition Language (IDL). Unfortunately, IDL does not allow designers to take into account system properties like object constraints, relations, and business rules, as reported by UML models. Therefore, no trace of such properties is kept into skeletons of source code automatically generated by idl compilers so that their implementation is completely in charge of software programmers. In this paper a process for adding object constraints and business rules in component based applications is presented. In particular, we provide: i) a constraint language to produce models, in addition to idl interfaces, for specifying object constrains and business rules; ii) some implementation patterns for turning constraints and rules in source code; and iii) a preliminary tool able to interpret the constraint language and then to add rules and constraints in the skeletons of software components generated by a commercial idl compiler.