Cadena: an integrated development, analysis, and verification environment for component-based systems

The use of component models such as Enterprise Java Beans and the CORBA Component Model (CCM) in application development is expanding rapidly. Even in real-time safety/mission-critical domains, component-based development is beginning to take hold as a mechanism for incorporating non-functional aspects such as real-time, quality-of-service, and distribution. To form an effective basis for development of such systems, we believe that support for reasoning about correctness properties of component-based designs is essential. In this paper, we present Cadena - an integrated environment for building and modeling CCM systems. Cadena provides facilities for defining component types using CCM IDL, specifying dependency information and transition System semantics for these types, assembling systems from CCM components, visualizing various dependence relationships between components, specifying and verifying correctness properties of models of CCM systems derived from CCM IDL, component assembly information, and Cadena specifications, and producing CORBA stubs and skeletons implemented in Java. We are applying Cadena to avionics applications built using Boeing's Bold Stroke framework.