Research On The Design Methods And Description Mechanism For Aspect Oriented Software Architecture

The software architecture of a system focuses on its global organization and defines its high-level abstraction structure. Consisting of components, connectors and configurations, software architecture plays an important role for controlling the complexity of software systems, improving software quality and supporting software development and reuse.Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), whose basic characteristics are quantification and obliviousness, is a new software technology emerged after Object Oriented Programming. At code level, AOP has effectively solved the tangling problem caused by the crosscutting phenomena in software system. The software system, developed with the technology of AOP, has fewer lines of code and is much easier to be modified, extended and maintained.Introducing the concept of aspect from AOP into the high-level abstraction structure of a system, Aspect Oriented Software Architecture (AOSA) deals with the architectural crosscutting problem of the system. This paper mainly focuses on the design and description of aspect-oriented software architecture. And the corresponding work is as follow. First, introducing the concept of aspect into a classical method of software architecture design, this paper proposes a method for designing aspect-oriented software architecture based on evaluation and transformation. Second, as for the concern composition problem existed in the process of aspect-oriented software architecture design, this paper presents three strategies for concern composition: cumulative composition strategy, once off composition strategy and hierarchical composition strategy. Also this paper shows the analysis and comparison of them in great detail. Third, in order to describe aspect-oriented software architecture, this paper, in a symmetric way, proposes an extension to ACME ADL by employing the concept of aspectual connector. Moreover, for the convenience of the description of aspect-oriented software architecture, this paper presents the qualification of the specification, namely, the qualification in the specification of configuration and aspectual connector. Forth, using the proposal, this paper analyses an Online Bookstore System (OBS) as the case study. This work is helpful for the development and maintenance of aspect-oriented software system.