Contract-based programming is one of the techniques used to improve the quality of software by enhancing the formalism of interface specifications. In the context of distributed software components, the use of contracts presents new challenges that make it di*erent from its traditional use. This work intends to evaluate the use of contracts in the development of component-based distributed systems, identifying the current approaches and analyzing its advantages and disadvantages. It also covers topics like robustness, performance, flexibility, ease of use and limitations. As a case study, a contract subsystem was developed over a CORBA middleware using Lua, serving as the basis for experiments in our study.