Event Details
Aspects of Aspects and Product Families
Presenter: Dr. Don Batory - David BrutonCentennial Professorship, University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A.
Supervisor:
Date: Mon, April 29, 2002
Time: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
Place: Clearihue Building (CLE), Room # C 112
ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT:
An aspect is a module that implements a feature or requirement that can appear in many programs. Unlike conventional components (e.g., COM, CORBA, EJB), an aspect encapsulates fragments of multiple classes. Compositions of aspects (features) are required to produce sets of fully-formed classes that define a target program. Aspects are thus unconventional modular building blocks of programs. But what are the building blocks of aspects? We argue that aspects of aspects (AoA) is the answer. An AoA encapsulates fragments of multiple aspects, and compositions of AoAs yields sets of fully-formed aspects. AoAs arise when aspect models scale from producing of variants of individual programs to producing variants of multiple integrated programs, as typified by product families (e.g., MS Office).
We present an elegant mathematical model of AoA that explains relationships between aspects and AoAs. We use the model to develop a generator for a set of tools (i.e., product-family) that are used in language extensible Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).