DDT: An IDE for an aspect oriented software development platform

Abstract

AOSD (Aspect Oriented Software Development) is a methodology that focuses on separating the crosscutting concerns of an application from its components. Among others, the main benefits of this separation are higher legibility of each concern, higher modularization of the application, more concern reuse and improved software maintainability. There exist a number of AOSD platforms that differ, mainly, in the way they weave components and crosscutting (aspect) concerns and the supported programming languages. DSAW (Dynamic and Static Aspect Weaver) is a .NET aspect-oriented platform. In an aspect- oriented program, different source files for components, aspects and pointcuts are used, making it difficult to the programmer to have a global view of the application. Other AOP platforms make use of IDEs to facilitate the programmer to apply the AOP methodology. We have extended the Visual Studio IDE to provide DSAW programmers the usual features they find in other AOP environments.