Architectural views of aspects

Abstract

Support for the incremental design of aspects themselves has been neglected, even as the use of aspects in conjunction with underlying systems is gaining acceptance. The ways in which aspects can cooperate or interfere with each other need to be made explicit at the design level. An aspect architecture, a new software architecture viewtype, is proposed, and its general principles are explained. An instantiation for extending UML is described, where designs of aspects provide maximal flexibility, and a new concern diagram is provided to show how aspects can be combined to treat different concerns of a system. An example shows aspect architecture views of a digital sound recorder.