An overview of Mirjam and WeaveC

In this chapter, we elaborate on the design of an industrial-strength aspectoriented programming language and weaver for large-scale software development. First, we present an analysis on the requirements of a general purpose aspect-oriented language that can handle crosscutting concerns in ASML software. We also outline a strategy on working with aspects in large-scale software development processes. In our design, we both re-use existing aspect-oriented language abstractions and propose new ones to address the issues that we identified in our analysis. The quality of the code ensured by the realized language and weaver has a positive impact both on maintenance effort and lead-time in the first line software development process. As evidence, we present a short evaluation of the language and weaver as applied today in the software development process of ASML

Challenges and Directions in Formalizing the Semantics of Modeling Languages

Developing software from models is a growing practice and there exist many model-based tools (e.g., editors, interpreters, debuggers, and simulators) for supporting model-driven engineering. Even though these tools facilitate the automation of software engineering tasks and activities, such tools are typically engineered manually. However, many of these tools have a common semantic foundation centered around an underlying modeling language, which would make it possible to automate their development if the modeling language specification were formalized. Even though there has been much work in formalizing programming languages, with many successful tools constructed using such formalisms, there has been little work in formalizing modeling languages for the purpose of automation. This paper discusses possible semantics-based approaches for the formalization of modeling languages and describes how this formalism may be used to automate the construction of modeling tools

Detecting behavioral conflicts among crosscutting concerns

Aspects have been successfully promoted as a means to improve the modularization of software in the presence of crosscutting concerns. Within the Ideals project, aspects have been shown to be valuable for improving the modularization of idioms (see also Chapter 1). The so-called aspect interference problem is considered to be one of the remaining challenges of aspect-oriented software development: aspects may interfere with the behavior of the base code or other aspects. Especially interference among aspects is difficult to prevent, as this may be caused solely by the composition of aspects that behave correctly in isolation. A typical situation where this may occur is when multiple advices are applied at the same, or shared, join point. In this chapter we explain the problem of behavioral conflicts among aspects at shared join points, illustrated by aspects that represent idioms: Parameter checking and Error propagation. We present an approach for the detection of behavioral conflicts that is based on a novel abstraction model for representing the behavior of advice. The approach employs a set of conflict detection rules which can be used to detect both generic conflicts as well as domain or application specific conflicts. One of the benefits of the approach is that it neither requires the application programmers to deal with the conflict models, nor does it require a background in formal methods for the aspect programmers