A Model-Driven Framework for Aspect Weaver Construction

Aspect orientation has been used to improve the modularization of crosscutting concerns that emerge at different levels of software abstraction. Although initial research was focused on imparting aspect-oriented (AO) capabilities to programming languages, the paradigm was later on extended to software artifacts that appear at higher levels of abstraction (e.g., models). In particular, the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm has largely benefitted from the inclusion of aspect-oriented techniques. In a converse way, we believe it may also be productive to investigate how MDE techniques can be adopted to benefit the development of aspect-oriented tools. The main objective of this paper is to show how MDE techniques can be used to improve the construction of aspect weavers for General-Purpose Languages (GPLs) through reusable models and transformations. The approach described in the paper uses models to capture the concepts of various Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) language constructs at a metamodeling level. These models are then mapped to concrete weavers for GPLs through a combination of higher-order model transformation and program transformation rules. A generic extension to the framework further supports reusability of artifacts among weavers during the construction process. Aspect weavers for FORTRAN and Object Pascal have been constructed using the framework, and their features evaluated against several case study applications.