Supporting the development of CAM/DAOP applications: an integrated development process

Abstract

The increasing complexity of large‐scale distributed applications is driving the Software Engineering community to adopt new software technologies for the development of distributed systems. In this sense, the emergence of component‐based software engineering represents a significant advance towards assembling applications by plugging in pre‐fabricated components. Additionally, the principle of ‘advanced’ separation of concerns is nowadays widely applied to improve modularity, reusability and adaptability of software components. In this way, the aspect‐oriented software development paradigm separates into a new dimension, named aspect, those properties that crosscut the system ‘objects’ or ‘components’, reducing their dependencies. However, the development of software based on the composition of components and aspects is still in its early stages. Part of the reason for this is the lack of well‐defined development processes and tools that help software developers in the use of existing component and aspect‐based approaches. Therefore, the primary aim of this paper is to propose an integrated development process for deriving applications by the assembly of a set of prefabricated components and aspects. This process supports the development of Component‐Aspect Model/Dynamic Aspect‐Oriented Platform (CAM/DAOP) applications, where CAM/DAOP is a new model and platform based on components and aspects. Our intention is to show how, with the support of the integrated development process presented in this paper, it is possible to use CAM/DAOP as an alternative to current distributed platforms. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Generating CAM aspect-oriented architectures using Model-Driven Development

“…While some of them add a new building block named aspect to model crosscutting concerns, others represent aspects as components with a different semantics, or as components that provide or require special ''crosscutting" interfaces. In this sense, DAOP-ADL [31,36] (part of CAM/DAOP) and Fractal [30,37] extend traditional components with a new kind of aspectual interfaces. However, other approaches such as AO-ADL [34], AspectualACME [9] and Navasa's language [33] use the same building block (e.g., the component) to represent both non-crosscutting and crosscutting concerns.…”

“…We have integrated the MDD transformations presented in this paper as part of the development process of the CAM/DAOP platform [36]. Applications running on top of the CAM/DAOP platform must be implemented using the CAM/DAOP development framework and the application architecture must be specified in DAOP-ADL.…”

“…In the first sub-section, we present the MDD tools used to construct the initial models and to perform the model transformations. Then, we describe how these tools have been integrated with an IDE previously built to support the development of CAM/DAOP applications [36].…”

“…The MDD transformations described throughout the paper have been integrated as part of the IDE developed for CAM/DAOP [36] (see Figs. 12 and 13).…”

Model-driven development for early aspects

“…In the latter case, the designer or developer would need to manually weave the aspectual components with the components they crosscut and the benefits achieved by the aspect-oriented decomposition will lose, so this option is not recommended at least it is strictly required. (2) The CAM aspect-oriented architecture can be used to automatically generate (see [44]a,2008b)) a DAOP-ADL description, which is used to run an application on the DAOP platform [85,43]. The DAOP platform is a distributed component and aspect based platform, where aspects and components are dynamically composed at runtime using the information provided by the DAOP-ADL aspect-oriented architectural description language [84].…”