Formal model and DSL for separation of concerns based on views

Abstract

The separation of concerns (SOC), as a conceptual tool, enables us to manage the complexity of software systems that we develop. The benefits of this paradigm, such as reuse, enhanced quality and adaptability, have been key drivers of its adoption. Modern software systems and applications take advantage of the technologies built around this paradigm, in which a client program can access different functional aspects (views) of the same domain. One of these SOC approaches is View-oriented Computing (VOC), which suffers from a formal model to canonically and consistently represent the different concepts of VOC as well to have the necessary background to formally verify the systems build on top of it. This paper describes a formal algebra-based model to describe different entities related to VOC. Especially, it introduces algebra and formalism associated with a Domain Specific Language (DSL) notation to illustrate the VOC paradigm. © JOT 2010.