A Systematic Approach for Structuring Exception Handling in Robust Component-Based Software
This article addresses the systematic incorporation of exception handling into component-based systems. By "component-based", one can infer "object-oriented" since the use of libraries of classes, such ast STL and JCL, can be seen as the use of components, building blocks, while constructing large-scale software systems. Read this article in its entirety to get a sense of how to put exception handling to good use.
Conclusions
An initial assessment of the approach described in this paper has been presented elsewhere. Our present work improves this initial assessment adding a new type of exception handler. Pagano describes an extended version of the case study presented in Section 5. Guerra presents a case study describing the application of the proposed exception handling strategy to a real-world banking application.
Although the workflow described in Section 4.4 may be used in isolation, it is more effective if fully integrated with a CBD process. In this manner, it can be refined and the specification of the exceptional behaviour of a system can be taken into account since early stages of development. We are currently extending the UML components process with the method described in Section 4.4. This effort builds upon previous work on the definition of a CBD process that takes the exceptional behaviour of a system into consideration.
Our most immediate future work consists of developing tools for partially automating the implementation of handlers at both inter-component and intra-component levels. This is an ongoing work that is being conducted in the context of a larger project.
Other important issues to be addressed in future works are: (i) to measure quantitatively the impact of the proposed approach in the reliability of the final system; and (ii) to investigate how the proposed approach can be extended to include guidelines for structuring concurrent exception handling. For the reliability analysis, our intent is to apply fault-injection techniques on both implementations of the Complaint Management Subsystem to obtain statistical data about the frequency of failures before and after the application of the proposed approach. The structuring of concurrent exception handling, at the architectural level, is currently being addressed by our research.
Furthermore, we intend to evaluate the applicability of aspect-oriented programming techniques to increase separation of concerns in two complementary levels. First, to specify architectural level exception handlers. In this case, aspects would complement existing architecture description languages, instead of programming languages. The result of weaving such aspects would be an extended architecture description that expresses certain properties regarding dependability. Second, to help in decoupling the implementation of the normal and exceptional behaviours of systems built according to the proposed guidelines. These are both ongoing works that are described in more detail elsewhere.