Components generally offer generic services in order to be easily reused.
It is a component that encapsulates any kind of communication service or protocol. Other components, that could possibly be distributed, are connected to these mediums and use their communication services. Its aim is to precisely defines the contract, the behavior of a medium from its user's point of view. This methodology of specification will be integrated into the UML CASE Tool Umlaut , in development at the Irisa, in order to do medium validation and automatically code generation. Eric Cariou, PhD student at the ENST Bretagne and at the Irisa.