Propositionalism about intention: shifting the burden of proof

A widespread view in the philosophy of mind and action holds that intentions are propositional attitudes. Call this view ‘Propositionalism about Intention’. The key alternative holds that intentions have acts, or do-ables, as their contents. Propositionalism is typically accepted by default, rather than argued for in any detail. By appealing to a key metaphysical constraint on any account of intention, I argue that on the contrary, it is the Do-ables View which deserves the status of the default position, and Propositionalism which bears the burden of proof. I go on to show that this burden has not been met in the literature

An XML-Based Language to Support Performance and Reliability Modeling and Analysis in Software Architectures

Abstract. In recent years, the focus of software development has pro-gressively shifted upward, in the direction of the abstract level of ar-chitecture specification. However, while the functional properties of the systems have been extensively dealt with in the literature, relatively less attention has been given until recently to the specification and analysis at the architectural level of quality attributes such as performance and reliability. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first we discuss the type of information that should be provided at the architectural level in order to successfully address the problem of performance and reliability modeling and analysis of software systems; based on this discussion, we define an extension of the xADL architectural language that enables the support for stochastic modeling and analysis of performance and relia-bility in software architectures.

Automatic control flow generation from software architectures

In a traditional software architecture, control originates in components and flows to other components via connectors. The system’s control flow is fixed at design time, when components and their inter-connections are specified. Code generated from the design inherits this control flow, and consists of component code and glue code that tightly couples connected components. This means that code generated from a given software architecture is system-specific, and is therefore neither generic nor reusable. In this paper we describe an approach which allows separate reuse of component code and connector code, and thus making it possible to build architectures from pre-existing components and generic connectors. Furthermore, we show we can implement such architectures by generating control flow at run-time automatically

Good Architecture = Good (ADL + Practices)

International audienceIn order to ensure the quality of their software development, companies incorporate best practices from recognized repositories or from their own experiences. These best practices are often described in software quality manuals which does not guarantee their implementation. In this paper, we propose a framework for the implementation of best practices concerning the design of the software architecture. We treat first the case of architecture design activity because it's the basis of the software development process. Our framework enables on the one hand to describe best practices and on the other hand to check their application by designers. We present an implementation of our framework in the Eclipse platform and for an ADL dedicated to Web applications. Finally, we give an example of use taken from the context of our industrial partner

Using a teleo-reactive programming style to develop self-healing applications

A well designed traditional software system is capable of recognising and either avoiding or recovering from a number of expected events. However, during the design phase it is not possible to envision and thus equip the software to handle all events or perturbations that can occur; this limits the extent of adaptability that can be achieved. Alternatively a goal-oriented system has the potential to steer around generic classes of problems without the need to specifically identify these. This paper presents a teleo-reactive approach for the development of robust adaptive and autonomic software where the focus is on high level goals rather than the low level actions and behaviour of software systems. With this approach we maintain focus on the business objectives of the system rather than the underlying mechanisms. An extensible software framework is presented, with an example application which shows how unexpected events can be dealt with in a natural way

JPloy: User-Centric Deployment Support in a Component Platform

Based on a vision that, in the future, applications will be flexibly built out of small-grained components, we argue that current technologies do not adequately support component deployment in such a setting. Specifically, current technologies realize deployment processes where most decisions are made by the application manufacturer. When using small-grained components, however, the component user needs to have more control over the deployment process; user-centric deployment is needed. In this paper, we describe our initial efforts at providing user-centric deployment. We present JPloy, a prototypical tool that gives a user more control about the configuration of installed Java components. JPloy extends the Java class loader so that custom configurations can be applied to existing components, without having to modify the components themselves. For example, name space or versioning conflicts among components can be elegantly resolved in this way. We demonstrate JPloy by applying it to an example application