Andrew Simon Clement

Large-scale AOSD for middleware

For a variety of reasons, todays middleware systems are highly complex. This complexity surfaces internally in the middleware construction, and externally in the programming models supported and features offered. We believed that aspect-orientation could help with these problems, and undertook a case study based on members of an IBM® middleware product-line. We also wanted to know whether aspect-oriented techniques could scale to commercial project sizes with tens of thousands of classes, many millions of lines of code, hundreds of developers, and sophisticated build systems. This paper describes the motivation for our research, the challenges involved, and key lessons that we learnt in refactoring both homogeneous and heterogeneous crosscutting concerns in the middleware.

The concern manipulation environment

The area of aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) has seen much progress in the past few years towards improving the quality of object-oriented, generative, and component-based software engineering, including some use in large-scale applications. Large-scale AOSD requires tools, paradigms, and methodologies that support multiple aspect models, multiple artifacts and formalisms, and multiple tasks and activities. The Concern Manipulation Environment (CME) is an Eclipse open source project that aims to provide a set of open, extensible components and a set of tools that promote aspect-oriented software development throughout the software lifecycle. This paper provides an overview of this programming environment. It also provides a general discussion of the available tools and the platforms where this environment can be integrated.

The concern manipulation environment [OOPSLA/GPCE]

The Concern Manipulation Environment (CME) aims to provide a set of open, extensible components and a set of tools that promote aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) throughout the software lifecycle. It has two main goals: To provide an open, integrated development environment (IDE) to enable software engineers to use AOSD techniques throughout the software lifecycle, and to allow them to use different AOSD approaches in an integrated manner. To promote the rapid development of new tools supporting AOSD at any stage of the software lifecycle, and to serve as an integrating platform for such tools, facilitating development and experimentation with new AOSD approaches. This demonstration will highlight a number of tools and components that are useful to software developers and to AOSD tool providers and researchers. Tools for software developers include ones that allow developers to identify, model and visualize concerns, aspects and relationships in their software, covering software artifacts of any type, including both code and non-code artifacts, and including latent concerns or aspects that were not separated in the artifacts; that enable flexible queries over software; and that compose/integrate aspects and other concerns. For AOSD tool providers and researchers, the demonstration will describe some of the CMEs support for integration of tools and approaches within the environment, highlighting the integration of Java, AspectJ and Ant artifacts within the CME, and how to use the CMEs extensible components to create new AOSD tools or prototypes rapidly.