Component-based applications require good middleware support. In particular, business logic should be separated from management code for guaranteeing nonfunctional properties of a system. We present an approach called Container-Managed Quality Assurance, in which a component container uses nonfunctional specifications of components to determine how to use these components, and which system resources to allocate, to provide certain services with guaranteed nonfunctional properties.

As an example, we show how this technique can be applied to automatically allocating CPU and memory resources for components with real-time constraints. To this end, we use a mathematical model based on jitterconstrained streams, a mathematical abstraction of event streams.