A case study on building COTS-based system using aspect-oriented programming

More and more software projects are using COTS (Commercialoff-the-shelf) components. Using COTS components brings both advantages and risks. To manage some risks in using COTS components, it is necessary to increase the reusability of the glue-code so that the problematic COTS components can easily be replaced by other components. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) claims to make it easier to reason about, develop, and maintain certain kinds of application code. To investigate whether AOP can help to build an easy-to-change COTS-based system, a case study was performed by comparing changeability between an object-oriented application and its aspect-oriented version. Results from this study show that integrating COTS component using AOP may help to increase the changeability of the COTS component-based system, if the cross-cutting concerns in the glue-code are homogenous (i.e., consistent application of the same or very similar policy in multiple places). Extracting heterogeneous or par...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Axel Anders Kvale, Jingyue Li, Reidar Conradi
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Aspect-oriented Programming, Cots Component, Problematic Cots Components, SAC 2005