An aspect-oriented framework for developing component-based software with the collaboration-based architectural style

Abstract

Component-based development (CBD) technique for software has emerged to fulfill the demand on the reuse of existing artifacts. In comparison to traditional object-oriented techniques, CBD can provide more advanced abstraction concepts such as subsystem-level reusability, gross structure abstraction, and global control flow abstraction. Unfortunately, existing software development techniques are not mature enough to make it come true that components developed in the third party can be used in a highly flexible way. It is notable that there are certain kinds of software requirements, such as non-functional requirements, that must be implemented cross-cutting multiple classes, largely losing the modularity in object-oriented design and implementation code. Therefore, it is not easy that components are reused without consideration of their low-level implementation details. In this article, we propose Aspect-Oriented Development Framework (AODF) in which functional behaviors are encapsulated in each component and connector, and particular non-functional requirements are flexibly tuned separately in the course of software composition. To support the modularity for non-functional requirements in component-based software systems, we devise Aspectual Composition Rules (ACR) and Aspectual Collaborative Composition Rule (ACCR). Note that AODF makes component-based software built to provide both supports of modularity and manageability of non-functional requirements such as synchronization, performance, physical distribution, fault tolerance, atomic transaction, and so on. With the Collaboration-Based architectural style, AODF explicitly enables to deal with nonfunctional requirements at the intra-component and inter-component levels. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.