Dynamically linked Domain-Specific Extensions for Advice Languages

Domain-specific aspect languages allow defining aspects for a certain problem domain faster and easier by providing specialized expressivity and by reducing the complexity of the language interface. However, providing domain-specific aspect languages is a rather complex task. With current approaches only specialists can build new domain specific aspect languages; in doing so they have to replicate large parts of the tool set. In this paper, we have extended a general-purpose aspect language to support embedded domain-specific syntax in the advice language. The approach has several advantages. First, it allows reusing a large part of existing tools and infrastructure. Second domain-specific extensions can be defined in separated modules, which can be dynamically linked into the advice language; these modules can be inherited from, they can be refined from existing implementations, and can be composed to support abstractions from different domains