On the Interplay of Aspects and Dynamic Reconfiguration in a Specification-to-Deployment Environment

In this paper, we propose the application of concepts from aspectoriented software development to facilitate modular treatment of dynamic reconfiguration descriptions in specification-to-deployment environments. Our strategy differs from earlier work in the area by blending aspects and architecture abstractions simply and seamlessly through a special kind of connector — called an aspectual connector — that encapsulates reconfiguration interactions. More specifically, we propose an aspect-oriented specification-to-deployment environment, called AO-Plastik, that uses our AspectualAcme ADL to specify dynamic reconfiguration by means of aspectual connectors, and maps these specifications onto a reflective component runtime platform.