Introducing Separation of Aspects at Design Time

Abstract

Different proposals have been developed in order to separate object functionality from other non-functional propertiers like concurrency, synchronization, distribution,etc. ATOM, AspectJ, Composition Filters and Disguises Model are four of them. In these models object functionality is separated form non-functional propertiers, and composed later at compile or runtime. Separation is necessary when applications need a high degree of reusability or adaptability. The models mentioned above achieve this goal at implementation level, but what happends at design level? Why we don´t take advantage of separation of aspects at design time? Our work introduces separation of aspects at design time. UML is used as the modeling language and its semantic has been extended in order to represent object functional design separated from other non-functional designs. The main goal of our work is to generate code for different separation models starting from the same design. In this way a generator application has been developed. This application can generate code for AspectJ, Composition Filters and Disguises Model starting from a UML design. The introduction of separation of aspects at design level provides two basic advantages: the generated code is not affected by inheritance anomaly, and a higher degree of reusability is achieved, due to designs being reused in different domains.