The publish/subscribe style is an emerging paradigm for the construction of loosely coupled systems. Yet, the verification of such systems remains difficult. We have constructed a framework called RAY for testing publish/subscribe applications. This framework is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in. In this paper, we present the detailed architecture of RAY, as well as the interaction with its supporting components. In addition to the presented architecture for a testing framework for publish/subscribe applications, the contribution of this paper includes the experience gained during the development of this framework

We propose a novel framework logic of event consumption and publication (LECAP) for the development of event-based applications. Our approach offers the following advantages over existing approaches: 1) it supports a while-parallel language, 2) the reasoning allows a dynamic (instead of static) binding of programs to events, 3) it is oriented towards stepwise development of systems, and 4) the underlying logic supports the composition of specifications. The event based architectural style has been recognized as fostering the development of large-scale and complex systems by loosely coupling their components. It is therefore increasingly deployed in various environments such as middleware for mobile computing, message oriented middleware, integration frameworks, communication standards, and commercial toolkits. Current approaches to the development of event-based applications are ad hoc and do not support reasoning about their correctness. The LECAP approach is intended to solve this problem through a compositional and stepwise approach to specification and verification of event-based applications.

Large, global enterprises are increasingly faced with the problem of supporting employees that are on the move. Employees need to share business documents, locate expertise and knowledge through distributed searches, access effective subscription/notification mechanisms, and they need any time, anywhere access to the company's information resources. We address these problems and requirements in the MObile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION) project and aim to create an advanced information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure for mobile teamwork. We give a brief description of the MOTION peer-to-peer platform for mobile teamwork.

As the complexity of applications and therefore of their testing process grows, the importance of automating the testing activity increases. The testing process includes test case generation, test sequencing, oracle construction, test execution and result interpretation. Automatic generation of test cases from formal specifications has received considerable attention. Relatively little work has been reported, however, on constructing oracles for supporting efficient and automatic execution of such test cases. We present a technique for constructing a CORBA-supported VDM oracle for black-box testing starting from a VDM-SL specification. This specification is used to automatically verify the results of operations implemented in a high-level programming language. We present a case study of the technique applied to a Java application for generic access control. The technique is applicable to any CORBA-compliant programming language.

We present an approach to requirements validation in which the formal specification of the requirements is directly, interpreted and the results are visually, presented to the customer through a graphical user interface, relying on the customer to visually, validate the specified requirements. The communication between the user interface and the specification interpreter is accomplished through CORBA. The approach supports the cooperation of customers and developers in eliciting and validating the requirements. We present a case study of the application of the technique to the validation of a generic access control component. The use of CORBA has the advantage that any, CORBA-compliant language can be used for the user interface, independently of the implementation of the specification interpreter The contributions of the paper are 1) the presentation of a case stud), of the visual requirement validation technique, 2) the revision and improvement of a previously presented visual validation technique, and 3) the application of requirements validation to a reusable component.

Mobile teamwork has become an emerging requirement in the daily business of large enterprises. Employees collaborate across locations and need support while they are on the move. Business documents (artifacts) and expertise need to be shared independent of the actual location or connectivity (e.g., access through a mobile phone, laptop, Personal Digital Assistant, etc.) of employees. Although many collaboration tools and systems exist, most do not deal with new requirements such as locating artifacts and experts through distributed searches, advanced information subscription and notification, and mobile information sharing and access. The MOTION service architecture that we have developed supports mobile teamwork by taking into account the different connectivity modes of users, provides access support for various devices such as laptop computers and mobile phones, and uses XML meta-data and the XML Query Language (XQL) for distributed searches and subscriptions. In this paper, we describe the architecture and the components of our generic MOTION service platform for building collaborative applications. The MOTION Teamwork Services Components are currently being evaluated in two industry case-studies.

Formalizing security requirements has received a significant attention since the 70s. However a general method for specifying security requirements is still missing. Especially, little work has been presented on specifying and verifying that a given application is a secure resource consumer The purpose of this work is to set up a methodology for (1) specifying security requirements of service providers and (2) proving that some application securely uses some resources. The developed theory will be evaluated and applied in two different areas: secure mobile code development and secure COTS-based software development.