Component contract-based interface specification technique using Z

A simple contract contains formalizing preconditions, postconditions, and invariants. A contract describes the services that are provided by an object. In the component world, it is essential to describe correctly what services are provided by the components and how we can use them. Till now, interfaces are specified in IDL, which describes the syntactic aspect of interface. IDL cannot describe the semantic aspects and safety condition of a component that a client and a server must know how to use or implement it. In this paper, we use contracts specifying components and, propose an interface specification technique to describe components as a contract (namely, component contract). We regard a component's interface as contract and present which aspect to be specified for providing correct information of the components. This paper defines some definitions and describes operators such as cooperating components, component version, functional requirements, nonfunctional requirements, and performance measurements to specify components, and specifies them using Z scheme. Finally, we apply this interface specification technique to develop an e-commerce system.