Domain-driven discovery of stable abstractions for pointcut interfaces

ABSTRACT

The benefits of defining explicit pointcut interfaces in aspect-oriented applications have been advocated by many. A pointcut interface exposes a set of crosscutting abstract behaviours (as named pointcut signatures) that multiple aspects in the application can use. In accordance with the dependency inversion and stable dependencies principles, a pointcut interface should expose only stable abstractions in order to maximally promote its reuse across a family of applications.

In this paper, we propose a domain-driven architecture method for designing such stable pointcut interfaces. The method employs systematic reengineering of use case models to discover stable abstractions that are anchored in the domain model of the application. During architecture design, these stable domain abstractions are mapped to pointcut interfaces. As part of this mapping activity, the architecture is constrained to ensure that the pointcut interfaces can be implemented correctly.

We have applied this method in two applications, where we validate that pointcut interfaces can be reused for implementing the composition logic of different aspects without requiring modification to their pointcut signatures. Moreover, the method consistently yields pointcut interface hierarchies.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Data abstraction

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures

General Terms:
Design, Documentation

Keywords:
domain-driven architecture, reusable pointcut interfaces, stable domain abstractions