A Seamless Extension of Components with Aspects using Protocols

International audienceThis paper shows how components and aspects can be seamlessly integrated using protocols. A simple component model equipped with protocols is extended with aspect compo- nents. The protocol of an aspect component observes the service requests and replies of plain components, and possibly internal component actions, and react to these actions (possibly preventing some base actions to happen as is standard with AOP). A nice feature of the model is that an assembly of plain and aspect components can be transformed back into an assembly of components. All this is done without breaking the black-box nature of the components (dealing with internal actions requires to extend the component interface with an action interface)