Prototyping and composing aspect languages: using an aspect interpreter framework

Domain specific aspect languages (DSALs) are becoming more popular because they can be designed to represent recurring con-cerns in a way that is optimized for a specific domain. However, the design and implementation of even a limited domain-specific aspect language can be a tedious job. To address this, we propose a framework that offers a fast way to prototype implementations of domain specific aspect languages. A particular goal of the frame-work is to be general enough to support a wide range of aspect lan-guage concepts, such that existing language concepts can be easily used, and new language concepts can be quickly created. We show mappings of several domain specific aspect languages to demonstrate the framework. Since in our approach the DSALs are mapped to a common model, the framework provides an inte-grating platform allowing us to compose programs that use aspects written in multiple DSALs. The framework also provides explicit mechanisms to specify composition of advices written in multiple DSALs. 1