Formalising Middleware Systems: A Design Pattern-Based Approach

Middleware systems are widely recognized as complex software systems. The origin of this complexity is mainly related to the need of providing distribution transparencies (e.g., location, access, mobility) and services (e.g., naming, security, concurrency control) to distributed application developers. This complexity suggests the use of formal methods that can help in both understanding of the middleware´s behavior and checking of desired middleware properties. Due to the aforementioned complexity, the formalization itself is also not a trivial task. In this context, this paper presents an approach to formalize middleware systems centered on the formalization and composition of middleware design patterns. In order to illustrate the proposed approach, we formalize and check properties of an object oriented middleware.