Reusable aspect components for web applications

Abstract

Reusability is important especially in Web application development because Web applications tend to be rapidly developed and frequently modified. There are several studies to improve the reusability by adapting modular techniques in software engineering. However, the reusability brought by previous studies is restricted to limited Web applications because the techniques are deeply depended on the specific framework or architecture. In this paper, we propose an approach of defining reusable components for multiple Web applications using a domain-specific aspect-oriented (AO) mechanism based on an abstraction model common to all Web applications. As a case study to confirm the effectiveness of the approach, we present four practical examples of reusable aspect components and apply them to two real-sized open source Web applications. The result of the case study shows the domain-specific AO mechanism is an effective platform to implement reusable functionalities common to many Web applications.