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

A graph-based aspect interference detection approach for UML-based aspect-oriented models

Aspect Oriented Modeling (AOM) techniques facilitate separate modeling of concerns and allow for a more flexible composition of these than traditional modeling technique. While this improves the understandability of each submodel, in order to reason about the behavior of the composed system and to detect conflicts among submodels, automated tool support is required. Current techniques for conflict detection among aspects generally have at least one of the following weaknesses. They require to manually model the abstract semantics for each system; or they derive the system semantics from code assuming one specific aspect-oriented language. Defining an extra semantics model for verification bears the risk of inconsistencies between the actual and the verified design; verifying only at implementation level hinders fixng errors in earlier phases. We propose a technique for fully automatic detection of conflicts between aspects at the model level; more specifically, our approach works on UML models with an extension for modeling pointcuts and advice. As back-end we use a graph-based model checker, for which we have defined an operational semantics of UML diagrams, pointcuts and advice. In order to simulate the system, we automatically derive a graph model from the diagrams. The result is another graph, which represents all possible program executions, and which can be verified against a declarative specification of invariants.\ud To demonstrate our approach, we discuss a UML-based AOM model of the "Crisis Management System" and a possible design and evolution scenario. The complexity of the system makes con°icts among composed aspects hard to detect: already in the case of two simulated aspects, the state space contains 623 di®erent states and 9 different execution paths. Nevertheless, in case the right pruning methods are used, the state-space only grows linearly with the number of aspects; therefore, the automatic analysis scales

Mixing of Join Point Interfaces and Feature-Oriented Programming for Modular Software Product Line

Feature-oriented programming (FOP) and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) focus on to modularize incremental classes behavior and crosscutting concerns, respectively, for software evolution. So, these software development approaches represent advanced paradigms for a modular software product lines production. Thereby, a FOP and AOP symbiosis would permit reaching pros and cons of both approaches. FOP permits a modular re nement of classes collaboration for software product lines (SPL), an adequate approach to represent named heterogeneous crosscutting concerns. FOP works on changes of di erent functionality pieces for which to de ne join points is not a simple task. Similarly, AOP structurally modularizes in a re ned manner homogeneous crosscutting concerns. Since traditional AOP like AspectJ presents implicit dependencies and strong coupling between classes and aspects, and the Join Point Interface JPI ap-proach solves these classic AOP issues, this article presents JPI Feature Modules for the FOP + JPI SPL components modularization, i.e., collaboration of classes, aspects, and join point interfaces along with their evolution, for a SPL transparent implementation in a FOP + JPI context. In addition, this article shows JPI Feature Modules of a case study to highlight mutual bene ts of FOP and JPI approaches for a modular SPL software conception

JPI Feature Models: Exploring a JPI and FOP Symbiosis for Software Modeling

Looking for a complete modular software development paradigm, this article presents Join Point Interface JPI Feature Models, in the context of a JPI and Feature-Oriented Programming FOP symbiosis paradigm. Therefore, this article describes pros and cons of JPI and FOP approaches for the modular software and software product line production, respective; and highlights the benefits of this mixing proposal; in particular, the JPI Feature Model benefits for a high-level software product line modeling. As an application example, this article applies JPI Features Models on a classic FOP example already modeled using a previous aspect-oriented feature model proposal. Main goals of this application are to visualize traditional feature models preserved components such alternative and optional feature sets and optional and mandatory features as well as special features associations (cross-tree constraints), and differences and advantages with respect to previous research works about extending feature model to support aspect-oriented modeling principles

A notational Design of Join Points

Join points are the composition points where aspects are composed with the base system. In other words they are target hooks in the base system where aspect’s implementation is weaved in. Join points are not defined separately in aspect-oriented design rather a pointcut model is designed which consists of related join points. Grouping of related join points in a pointcut depends on designer’s intuition and corresponding aspect’s nature which makes some of the join points overlooked or not properly grouped with the related join points. This paper proposes a solution to this problem by providing design notations for representing join points in design. This kind of design of join points help designers design join points properly and group the related join points in one pointcut

Architecting Secure Software Systems Using an Aspect-Oriented Approach: : A Survey of Current Research

The importance of security in the development of complex software systems has increasingly become more critical as software becomes increasingly more pervasive in our everyday lives. Aspect-orientation has been proposed as a means to handle the crosscutting nature of security requirements when developing, designing and implementing security-critical applications. This paper surveys some of the approaches and contributions of integrating an aspect-oriented approach into designing and implementing secure software systems

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 Programming

Aspect-oriented programming is a promising idea that can improve the quality of software by reduce the problem of code tangling and improving the separation of concerns. At ECOOP'97, the first AOP workshop brought together a number of researchers interested in aspect-orientation. At ECOOP'98, during the second AOP workshop the participants reported on progress in some research topics and raised more issues that were further discussed. \ud \ud This year, the ideas and concepts of AOP have been spread and adopted more widely, and, accordingly, the workshop received many submissions covering areas from design and application of aspects to design and implementation of aspect languages