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SEPARATION OF CONCERNS AT DESIGN TIME

JOSE LUIS HERRERO
( SPAIN )

EXTREMADURA UNIVERSITY
ESCUELA POLITECNICA AVDA. DE LA UNIVERSIDAD S/N CÁCERES 10071
tel: 927257809
fax:
JHERRERO@UNEX.ES

Keywords:

analysis/design concurrency distribution software engineering

Abstract:

Object behaviour is determined by its functionality and other non-functional properties such as synchronization, concurrence, distribution, real-time, etc. Object-oriented systems define all these concepts inside the object body. Because of this, implementations with different purposes are mixed into the object code. This mixture produces some well known problems in the object-oriented paradigm. Inheritance anomaly and a low degree of reusability are two of them. In order to solve these problems, separation of concerns has been developed. Separation is necessary when applications need a high level of reusability or adaptability. There are different models, like ATOM, Composition Filters, AspectJ, Disguises Model that separate functional behaviour from non-functional properties. All of them are based on separate implementations. But, what happens at design level? Is separation a real advantage at this level? My research is focused on these questions and tries to introduce separation of concerns at earlier states of object life; more concretely, at system design level. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used as the modeling language. Its semantic has been extended in order to represent separation of concerns. In this way, object design is developed in three different levels: fucntional level, where object basic functionality is designed, concern level where non-functional policies are described and represented, and compositional level where functional design is composed with other non-functional designs. In this way,more degree of reusability is achieved, because all of these designs can be reused in different domains thanks to this composition mechanism. Synchronization is the first concern studied. Moreover, an application has been developed in order to generate COOL, Composition Filters or Disguises Model code starting from a UML design. In this way, synchronization stays separate, from design level to implementation level. System design, therefore, benefits from advantages resulting from separation of concerns.

The PhD work started: 1/08/1999

The submitted work will probably not be presented in the
upcoming ECOOP PhD Workshop.

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Last modified on Mon Aug 15 14:59:24 2005