Separation of Concerns through Stratified Architectures

Aspect-oriented programming essentially offers a way of enhancing the separation of concerns in software development. However, one of the most fundamental dimensions of concern, refinement, is not addressed in existing aspect-oriented approaches, despite the fact that much of the perceived "tangling" between software components comes from low level component interactions created by refining higher-level interactions. In this paper we discuss an approach, known as architecture stratification, which has the potential to rectify this problem and provide a synergy between the application of refinement and aspectoriented programming. After presenting the concept of a stratified architecture, we show how aspects relate to stratification, and discuss how the two ideas may complement each other.