Assessing Contemporary Modularization Techniques for Middleware Specialization

Middleware specialization is a technique to prune middleware fea-tures that are deemed unnecessary by the application domain, and to optimize and customize the relevant features to obtain domain-specific semantics within the middleware. Although contemporary modularization techniques, such as aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and feature-oriented programming (FOP), have been used in middleware specialization, there is a lack of a taxonomy that can assess the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques. To ad-dress these limitations, this paper develops a taxonomy that orga-nizes contemporary modularization approaches applied to the prob-lem of middleware specialization within a unified framework. The taxonomy helps assess the applicability of multiple modularization techniques used in concert for specializing system software such as middleware