AOSD Ontology 1.0 - Public Ontology of Aspect-Orientation

This report presents a Common Foundation for Aspect-Oriented Software Development. A Common Foundation is required to enable effective communication and to enable integration of activities within the Network of Excellence. This Common Foundation is realized by developing an ontology, i.e. the shared meaning of terms and concepts in the domain of AOSD. In the first part of this report, we describe the definitions of an initial set of common AOSD terms. There is general agreement on these definitions. In the second part, we describe the Common Foundation task in detail

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

The case of KAO

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaRequirements engineering aims at eliciting, analyzing, specifying, validating and managing system requirements. When eliciting system requirements, it is possible to use various approaches, including goal-oriented and aspect-oriented approaches. Although those are two well-known approaches, they are seldom used in conjunction. On the other hand, when using goal-oriented approaches, one common and usual problem is the fact that some of the goals repeat themselves all over the system. This makes goal-oriented models to have a boost in complexity because of the repeating goals, and thus, making the evolution of this model harder than necessary. This complexity could be minimized if an aspect-oriented approach would be used. The big advantage of using a hybrid approach, in our case goal-oriented and aspect-oriented one is the possibility to identify all the scattered goals and modularize them as aspects. In this way we can represent this kind of goal (now an aspect) only once in the model. This means the complexity of the model will be greatly reduced and the readability of the model will also be improved. The final result will be an evolution that could be easily controlled, thus minimizing errors. Although this seems a good idea, there are some challenges to overcome when merging goals and aspects. First of all, a notation and a set of rules must be built in order to compose the model. In order to do this we will use patterns based on roles, as these will help elaborating the model. This work will present an approach that will make possible after modeling the system with a goal-oriented approach, identify aspects and then refine the model taking into account the aspects. In order to accomplish this, the KAOS methodology will be extended with aspects

Leveraging service-oriented business applications to a rigorous rule-centric dynamic behavioural architecture.

Today’s market competitiveness and globalisation are putting pressure on organisations to join their efforts, to focus more on cooperation and interaction and to add value to their businesses. That is, most information systems supporting these cross-organisations are characterised as service-oriented business applications, where all the emphasis is put on inter-service interactions rather than intra-service computations. Unfortunately for the development of such inter-organisational service-oriented business systems, current service technology proposes only ad-hoc, manual and static standard web-service languages such as WSDL, BPEL and WS-CDL [3, 7]. The main objective of the work reported in this thesis is thus to leverage the development of service-oriented business applications towards more reliability and dynamic adaptability, placing emphasis on the use of business rules to govern activities, while composing services. The best available software-engineering techniques for adaptability, mainly aspect-oriented mechanisms, are also to be integrated with advanced formal techniques. More specifically, the proposed approach consists of the following incremental steps. First, it models any business activity behaviour governing any service-oriented business process as Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules. Then such informal rules are made more interaction-centric, using adapted architectural connectors. Third, still at the conceptual-level, with the aim of adapting such ECA-driven connectors, this approach borrows aspect-oriented ideas and mechanisms, and proposes to intercept events, select the properties required for interacting entities, explicitly and separately execute such ECA-driven behavioural interactions and finally dynamically weave the results into the entities involved. To ensure compliance and to preserve the implementation of this architectural conceptualisation, the work adopts the Maude language as an executable operational formalisation. For that purpose, Maude is first endowed with the notions of components and interfaces. Further, the concept of ECA-driven behavioural interactions are specified and implemented as aspects. Finally, capitalising on Maude reflection, the thesis demonstrates how to weave such interaction executions into associated services

Comprehensive Aspectual UML Approach to Support AspectJ

Unified Modeling Language is the most popular and widely used Object-Oriented modelling language in the IT industry. This study focuses on investigating the ability to expand UML to some extent to model crosscutting concerns (Aspects) to support AspectJ. Through a comprehensive literature review, we identify and extensively examine all the available Aspect-Oriented UML modelling approaches and find that the existing Aspect-Oriented Design Modelling approaches using UML cannot be considered to provide a framework for a comprehensive Aspectual UML modelling approach and also that there is a lack of adequate Aspect-Oriented tool support. This study also proposes a set of Aspectual UML semantic rules and attempts to generate AspectJ pseudocode from UML diagrams. The proposed Aspectual UML modelling approach is formally evaluated using a focus group to test six hypotheses regarding performance; a “good design” criteria-based evaluation to assess the quality of the design; and an AspectJ-based evaluation as a reference measurement-based evaluation. The results of the focus group evaluation confirm all the hypotheses put forward regarding the proposed approach. The proposed approach provides a comprehensive set of Aspectual UML structural and behavioral diagrams, which are designed and implemented based on a comprehensive and detailed set of AspectJ programming constructs

06302 Abstracts Collection -- Aspects For Legacy Applications

From 26.07.06 to 29.07.06, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06302 ``Aspects For Legacy Applications\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Aspect-oriented domain analysis

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaDomain analysis (DA) consists of analyzing properties, concepts and solutions for a given domain of application. Based on that information, decisions are made concerning the software development for future application within that domain. In DA, feature modeling is used to describe common and variable requirements for software systems. Nevertheless, they show a limited view of the domain. In the mean time, requirement approaches can be integrated to specify the domain requirements. Among them, we have viewpoint oriented approaches that stand out by their simplicity, and efficiency organizing requirements. However, none of them deals with modularization of crosscutting subjects. A crosscutting subject can be spread out in several requirement documents. In this work we will use a viewpoint oriented approach to describe the domain requirements extended with aspects. Aspect-oriented domain analysis (AODA) is a growing area of interest as it addresses the problem of specifying crosscutting properties at the domain analysis level. The goal of this area is to obtain a better reuse at this abstraction level through the advantages of aspect orientation. The aim of this work is to propose an approach that extends domain analysis with aspects also using feature modeling and viewpoint

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen