An architectural-level exception-handling system for component-based applications

Abstract

Component-based software systems built out of reusable software components are being used in a wide range of applications which have high dependability requirements. In order to accomplish the required levels of dependability, it is necessary to incorporate into these complex systems means for to cope with software faults. Exception handling is a well-known technique for adding forward error recovery to software systems supported by various mainstream programming languages. However, exception handling for component-based applications at the architectural level introduces new challenges which are not addressed by traditional exception handling systems, such as unavailability of source code, specially when off-the-shelf components are employed. In this paper, we present an exception handling system which adds fault tolerance to component-based systems at the architectural level. Our solution considers issues which are specific to component-based applications, such as unavailability of source code. We also present a framework which implements the proposed exception handling system for applications built using the C2 architectural style. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.