International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

The specification of join point selections (also known as "pointcuts") is a major design issue in Aspect-Oriented Software Development. Aspect-oriented systems generally provide specific language constructs (subsumed by the term "pointcut language") for specifying such a join point selection. Pointcut languages differ widely with respect to their syntax and semantics. Consequently, developers familiar with one specific language can hardly benefit from this knowledge when designing and implementing pointcuts in another language. This implies that developers working with different aspect-oriented languages can hardly communicate their design to each other, and knowledge about aspect-oriented design can hardly be transferred among developers developing in different languages. In order to overcome this problem, we present novel specification means based on the UML to represent diverse ways of join point selections — without relying on language-specific syntax and semantics. Instead, the proposed language constructs are able to express join point selections in a variety of different aspect-oriented programming languages.

Much attention has been focused on the problem of effectively designing software architecture to meet non-functional requirements (NFRs). The significant benefits of such work include detecting and removing defects earlier, which reduces development time and cost while improving the quality of the design; in turn the improved quality of the design makes it easier to maintain as the system evolves. The Formal Design Analysis Framework (FDAF) is an aspect-oriented approach proposed to support the design and analysis of multiple NFRs for distributed, concurrent, and real-time systems. In FDAF, non-functional requirements are realized and represented as reusable aspects in the repository; designs are captured in an extended version of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). FDAF supports the automated translation of extended UML designs into existing formal notations. Subsequently, the analysis of an aspect design is achieved using existing formal analysis tools, which leverages a large body of work in the research community. This paper focuses on the modeling and analysis of the response time performance aspect. The algorithms for translating extended UML diagrams into Rapide, the proofs of correctness for the algorithms, and an illustration of the FDAF approach using the Domain Name System are presented.

Software composition for timely and affordable software development and evolution is one of the oldest pursuits of software engineering. In current software composition techniques, Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) and Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) have attracted academic and industrial attention. Black box composition used in CBSD provides simple and safe modularization for its strong information hiding, which is, however, the main obstacle for a black box composite to evolve later. This implies that an application developed through black box composition cannot take advantage of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) used in AOSD. On the contrary, AOP enhances maintainability and comprehensibility by modularizing concerns crosscutting multiple components but lacks the support for the hierarchical and external composition of aspects themselves and compromises the important software engineering principles such as encapsulation, which is almost perfectly supported in black box composition. The role and role model have been recognized to have many similarities with CBSD and AOP but have significant differences with those composition techniques as well. Although each composition paradigm has its own advantages and disadvantages, there is no substantial support to realize the synergy of these composition paradigms; the black box composition, AOP, and role model. In this paper, a new composition technique based on representational abstraction of the relationship between component instances is introduced. The model supports the simple, elegant, and dynamic composition of components with its declarative form and provides the hooks through which an aspect can evolve and a parallel developed aspect can be merged at the instance level.

Domain-specific models increase the level of abstraction used to develop large-scale component-based systems. Model-driven development (MDD) approaches (e.g., Model-Integrated Computing and Model-Driven Architecture) emphasize the use of models at all stages of system development. Decomposing problems using MDD approaches may result in a separation of the artifacts in a way that impedes comprehension. For example, a single concern (such as deployment of a distributed system) may crosscut different orthogonal activities (such as component specification, interaction, packaging and planning). To keep track of all entities associated with a component, and to ensure that the constraints for the system as a whole are not violated, a purely model-driven approach imposes extra effort, thereby negating some of the benefits of MDD.

This paper provides three contributions to the study of applying aspect-oriented techniques to address the crosscutting challenges of model-driven component-based distributed systems development. First, we identify the sources of crosscutting concerns that typically arise in model-driven development of component-based systems. Second, we describe how aspect-oriented model weaving helps modularize these crosscutting concerns using model transformations. Third, we describe how we have applied model weaving using a tool called the Constraint-Specification Aspect Weaver (C-SAW) in the context of the Platform-Independent Component Modeling Language (PICML), which is a domain-specific modeling language for developing component-based systems. A case study of a joint-emergency response system is presented to express the challenges in modeling a typical distributed system. Our experience shows that model weaving is an effective and scalable technique for dealing with crosscutting aspects of component-based systems development.

Components should provide variability in satisfying a variety of domains [1], but it is not easy to develop components which can be applied to all domains. For this reason, when using time-to-market, components are slow and reusability of the components decreases. Hence, providing the variability of components becomes an important prerequisite for a successful component-based application development project.

In this paper, we propose a variability design technique that can satisfy the requirements of many different kinds of domains. This technique addresses a method for designing the variability of the behavior and the workflow in a more detailed manner, and uses an object-oriented mechanism and design patterns. One of the most important goals of this technique is to provide a practical method which can be effectively applied to component-based application development.

In this paper we describe an approach for modeling security issues in information systems. It is based on an agent-oriented approach, and extends it with the use of security patterns. Agent-oriented software engineering provides advantages when modeling security issues, since agents are often a natural way of conceptualizing an information system, in particular at the requirements stage, when the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders need to be considered. Our approach uses the Tropos methodology for modeling a system as a set of agents and their social dependencies, with specific extensions for representing security constraints. As an extension to the existing methodology we propose the use of security patterns. These patterns capture proven solutions to common security issues, and support the systematic and structured mapping of these constraints to an architectural model of the system, in particular for non-security specialists.