Developing Software Components with Aspects: Some Issues and Experiences

Engineering software components is quite a challenging task. Existing approaches to component-based software development are for the most part focused on functional decomposition. All have a number of weaknesses as they do not take into account cross-cutting concerns impacting components. In this chapter we outline a method we have developed called “aspect oriented component engineering”. Our approach uses aspects to help engineer better software components. We motivate our work with a simple distributed system example. We then describe how component specifications and designs can use aspects to provide additional information about components. We describe how aspects can be used to help implement more de-coupled software components. We show how encoded aspect information can be used at run-time to support component plug-and-play, retrieval and validation. We compare and contrast our approach to other component engineering methods and aspect-oriented software development techniques. 1