A Software Architecture-Based Approach for Formalising Middleware Behaviour

The number of open specifications of middleware systems and middleware services is increasing. Despite their complexity, they are traditionally described through APIs (the operation signatures) and informal prose (the behaviour). This fact often leads to ambiguities and makes difficult a better understanding of what is really described. In this paper, we adopt software architecture principles for structuring middleware together the LOTOS language for formalising their behaviour. The adoption of software architecture principles makes explicit structural aspects of the middleware. Meanwhile, the formalisation enables us to check behavioural properties of the middleware. In order to illustrate our approach, we present a LOTOS specification of the well-known object-oriented middleware CORBA and its transaction service.