A Symmetric and Unified Approach Towards Combining Aspect-Oriented and Component-Based Software Development

In this paper, we propose a novel approach towards integrating the ideas behind Aspect-Oriented and Component-Based Software Development. Our approach aims at achieving a symmetric, unified component architecture that treats aspects and components as uniform entities. To this end, a novel component model is introduced that does not employ specialized aspect constructs for modularizing crosscutting concerns. Instead, an expressive configuration language is provided that allows to describe both regular and aspect-oriented interactions amongst components. This paper presents the ongoing FuseJ research, a first experiment for realizing this symmetric and unified aspect/component architecture.