A Dynamic Component and Aspect-Oriented Platform

Component-based software development (CBSD) represents a significant advance towards assembling systems by plugging in independent and (re)usable components. On the other hand, aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) is presently considered as a possible technology to improve the modularity and adaptability of complex and large-scale distributed systems. Both are complementary technologies, so it would be helpful to have models that combine them to take advantage of all their mutual benefits. Thus recent research has tried to combine CBSD and AOSD by considering aspects as reusable parts that can be woven and then attached to the individual components. Our contribution to the integration of these technologies is CAM, a new component and aspect model that defines components and aspects as first-order entities, together with a non-intrusive composition mechanism to plug aspects into components. The underlying infrastructure supporting CAM is the dynamic aspect-oriented platform (DAOP), a component and aspect platform that provides the usual services of distributed applications, as well as a composition mechanism to perform the plugging of software aspects into components at runtime.