2.4 Interests in component-based software engineering

  In the telecommunications world, the concepts or paradigms used to specify systems are not finalized, i.e. this world is in perpetual motion. The solution defined in this paper to specify objects behaviour can be applied to many specification languages that specify objects behaviour with a logical formalism.

Our solution permits to animate specifications with only the addition of a new predicate (:=) in any logical formalism. Animating specifications is an advantage to prototype applications (see subsection 2.2) and in automatic code generation (a part of the system code).

With explicit determinism, the automatic code generation is easier because it can be mapped in programming language that implements system. For examples, the := predicate can be considered as an assignment operation, and an universally quantified formula as an iteration operation.

However, in implementation terms, the expressiveness of the explicit determinism defined in this paper is sufficient. The constraints defined in subsection 2.2 are very strong. An example is this formula :

$$x':=1 \land y':=2 \land z':= x' + y'$$ (9)

This formula is not valid because z':= x' + y' is not valid, but we can consider as valid with the use of a simple ordering algorithm.

A part of our work is to reduce the constraints of our solution to accept the previous kind of post-conditions.