Interact : un modèle général de contrat pour la garantie des assemblages de composants et services. (Interact : a general contract model for the guarantee of components and services assemblies)

To meet the new requirements of applications in terms of flexibility and modularity and upgradability as well as distribution, the components and services paradigms have been used in well known frameworks such as J2EE, OSGI, SCA or Fractal. However, these don’t offer tools for reasonning in a generic way on their architectural configuration and the specifications of their parts. In this thesis, I consider the organization of the verification of assemblies, and the diagnosis of their failures, from the point of view of a contractual, responsibility driven, approach. To this end, I analyze firstly the assumptions under which integrating various formalisms in this approach, then how to apply this approach to different architectures. Moreover, I study how people, intervening in the implementation of these systems, may take advantage of it. This leadsme to present a contract model, which integrates and organizes various properties (analyzed as required for assembly dependability) jointly and uniformly on different kinds of architectures. I define an object model which reifies the contractual logic, and its implementation as a framework. This latter is validated on the Fractal component model and two contractual formalisms, one assertion-based and the other constraining interactions sequences between participants. A more advanced validation is shown on the exemple of an instant communities application.