Extending Unified Modeling Language to Support Aspect-Oriented Software Development

Abstract

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is continuously gaining more importance as the complexity of software systems increases and requirement changes are high-rated. A smart way for making reuse of functionality without additional effort is separating the functional and non functional requirements. Aspect-oriented software development supports the capability of separating requirements based on concerns. AspectJ is one of the aspect-oriented implementations of Java. Using Model Driven Architecture (MDA) specifications, an AspectJ model representing AspectJ elements can be created in an abstract way with the ability to be applied in UML, Java or XML. One of the open source tools which support MDA and follows the standards of the Object Management Group (OMG) for both UML and MDA is Eclipse providing an implementation of MDA through Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). This paper focuses on creating a UML profile; a UML extension which supports language specifications for AspectJ using EMF. Our work is based on the latest UML specification (UML 2.5) and uses MDA to enable the inclusion of aspect-oriented concepts in the design process.