Aspect-Oriented Software Development

The definitive reference on the emerging and dynamic field of Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD).

Aspect-Oriented Software Development About the Editors

Robert E. Filman is a senior scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at NASA Ames Research Center, working on frameworks for distributed applications. He has worked and published in the areas of software engineering, distributed computing, network security, programming languages, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and human-machine interface. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1979 from Stanford University.

Tzilla Elrad is a research professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology, where she heads the Concurrent Software Systems research group. She received her B.S. in mathematics and physics from the Hebrew University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Syracuse University, NY and the Technion, Israel, respectively. Her research interests include concurrent programming languages design, adaptive software systems development, and formal reasoning.

Siobhán Clarke is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Trinity College, Dublin. Her research interests include aspect-oriented software development, context-aware computing and programming models for mobile, sentient, context-aware systems. She received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Dublin City University. Prior to her career in research, she worked as a software engineer with IBM for 11 years.

Mehmet Aks¸it holds an M.S. from the Eindhoven University of Technology and a Ph.D. from the University of Twente. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Twente, and he is also affiliated with the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology. He (and his group) have developed the composition filters aspect-oriented programming technique, synthesis-based architecture/software design, and techniques to synthesize architectures from solution domains for creating stable software systems, have applied fuzzy-logic to software design, and have created design formalisms such as Design Algebra for balancing various quality factors at different stages of software development.

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Aspect-Oriented Software Development PrefaceSoftware development is changing. The opportunities of the Internet, computerized businesses, and computer-savvy consumers, the exponential decline in the cost of computation and communication, and the increasingly dynamic environment for longer-living systems are pressing software developers to come up with better ways to create and evolve systems. There is fomenting in software development process, system structure, programming, quality assurance, and maintenance.Software is about building computational models of some part of the elements or information flow of the world. For all but the most trivial software systems, conquering the engineering of the system requires (perhaps recursively) dividing the system into chunks that can be (by and large) separately created and managed. The last decade of the twentieth century saw the rise (and perhaps dominance) of the object-oriented perspective on system modularization. Object-orientation focuses on selectingobjectsas the primary unit of modularity and associating with these objects all the system's behavior. Objects are typically elements of the domain or of the computational process.Object-orientation is reaching its limits. Many things one cares about in creating a software system (concerns) are not neatly localized to the behavior of specific "things." Building diverse systems requires simultaneously manipulating many concerns. Examples of concerns range from non-functional notions such as security, reliability, and manageability to precise implementation techniques such as concurrency control, caching, and error recovery. Since conventional programming technologies are centered on producing a direct sequence of instructions, they require the programmer to remain cognizant of all such concerns throughout the programming process. The programmer must explicitly intermix the commands to achieve these concerns with the code for the primary application functionality. This produces tangled code and erroneous and difficult-to-maintain systems.New technologies are emerging to allow richer specifications of programs and better modularization of these specifications. Along with these new technologies, we are also seeing novel software engineering methodologies for using them. One of the most exciting of these new technologies isaspect-oriented software development(AOSD). AOSD programming technologies (aspect-oriented programming, or AOP) provide linguistic mechanisms for separate expression of concerns, along with implementation technologies for weaving these separate concerns into working systems.Aspect-oriented software engineering(AOSE) technologies are emerging for managing the process of developing systems within this new paradigm. About This BookThis book grew out of our experience with the special issue on aspect-orientation in the October, 2001 Communications of the ACM. Seven times as many papers were submitted to that issue as we could print; those that appeared proved among the most popular in the ACM digital library. Simultaneously, we saw a growing number of increasingly popular workshops on aspect-oriented topics. There was clearly great interest in the computer science community for learning more about aspects. This led to two ideas--establishing an international conference on aspect-oriented software development and creating a book to illustrate to the advanced software development community the diversity of ideas in this space. The conference, organized by the Aspect-Oriented Software Association and co-sponsored by ACM, has recently had its third annual meeting; the proceedings are in the ACM digital library.We intend this book as a volume for advanced software engineers interested in learning about this new direction in software development. To populate the b