Towards developing generic solutions with aspects

Software industry has to face up to continuous and fast changes of technology as well as varying customer’s requirements. In order to adapt software for these new platforms and technologies at a minimum cost some proposals like MDA have been brought up, but also, simultaneously, others like aspect-oriented programming are addressing the changeability of customer’s requirements. We propose the use of the MDA philosophy to raise the level of abstraction of current aspect-oriented design modelling languages, because most of them are platform dependent. Thus, we suggest the use of concern-specific modelling languages to specify concerns in a platform independent way. And, we also propose to tailor UML to the specific requirements of each aspect, so that, UML extension mechanisms (MOF metamodels and UML-profiles) are needed to define semantics of new aspectspecific constructs. Finally, a rational is given to determine which extension mechanism is the best for specifying each concern-specific language.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC 2003-369