Proceedings Sixth Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of Contract-Oriented Software
This work tackles the problem of contract conformance for application developers in service-oriented systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing high-level models and formal language techniques.
The paper addresses the challenge of ensuring application code complies with negotiated contracts in service-oriented architectures, proposing the need for contract analysis tools that extract abstracted models for formal reasoning. It introduces the FLACOS workshop as a forum for researchers and practitioners to develop solutions through formalization, abstraction mechanisms, and analysis techniques.
The ability to negotiate contracts for a wide range of aspects and to provide services conforming to them is a most pressing need in service-oriented architectures. High-level models of contracts are making their way into the area, but application developers are still left to their own devices when it comes to writing code that will comply with a contract concluded before service provision. At the programming language level, contracts appear as separate concerns that crosscut through application logic. Therefore there is a need for contract analysis tools that extract abstracted models from applications so they become amenable to formal reasoning using formal language techniques. Since its inception, the aim of of FLACOS has been that of bringing together researchers and practitioners working on language- or application-based solutions to these problems through the formalization of contracts, the design of appropriate abstraction mechanisms, and tools and techniques for analysis of contracts, and analysis, testing and monitoring of conformance to contracts by applications.