Extending AOP with models

ABSTRACT

Aspect-oriented programming is a promising approach to address separation of concerns. Aspect-oriented programming languages address the problems of scattering and entanglement by providing an abstraction for specifying cross-cutting concerns in a modular manner. The relevant aspects are then composed to derive the desired implementation. However, current aspect-oriented programming languages only allow this composition to be specified in terms of programming language constructs. This is restrictive and can only be used for simple compositions. Many situations in practice need a richer composition context that cannot be expressed using programming language constructs. Models, being at a higher level of abstraction and closer to the problem domain, can be used to capture this information. We propose an approach to extend aspect-oriented programming with a composition mechanism that can make use of the information captured in models. We also outline an implementation of the proposed approach. The proposed approach has been used to seamlessly integrate model-centric and code-centric development.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Preprocessors

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
aspect-oriented programming, models, pointcut extension