FUSE 2004 Preliminary Version Applying Aspect-Oriented Composition to Framework Development – A Case Study

Object-oriented frameworks play an essential role in large-scale software projects. Frameworks let us benefit from tested code which provides variation points that can be customized to address project specific needs. The way to adapt frameworks depends on the composition techniques offered by the underlying programming sys-tem. Traditionally, frameworks use inheritance as dominant adaptation technique. Unfortunately, since the inheritance mechanism of languages like Smalltalk or Java is quite limited, the way how frameworks can be customized is limited, too. Hence, the reusability of frameworks is restricted to situations anticipated by the framework designers where the variation points meet exactly the developers ’ needs. Aspect-oriented programming is a new paradigm that provides new composition techniques. This paper shows that some design decisions in framework construction to be made in the context of object-oriented development can be avoided by applying aspect-oriented composition techniques addressing these issues only when required. With that, frameworks based on aspect-orientation allow us to access a larger variety of variation points, making these frameworks highly adaptable and reusable, address-ing more unforeseen circumstances