Aspect-Driven Design of Information Systems

Abstract

Contemporary enterprise web applications deal with a large stack of different kinds of concerns involving business rules, security policies, cross-cutting configuration, etc. At the same time, increasing demands on user interface complexity make designers to consider the above concerns in the presentation. To locate a concern knowledge, we try to identify an appropriate system component with the concern definition. Unfortunately, this is not always possible, since there exist concerns cross-cutting multiple components. Thus to capture the entire knowledge we need to locate multiple components. In addition to it, often, we must restate the knowledge in the user interface because of technological incompatibility between the knowledge source and the user interface language. Such design suffers from tangled and hard to read code, due to the cross-cutting concerns and also from restated information and duplicated knowledge. This leads to a product that is hard to maintain, a small change becomes expensive, error-prone and tedious due to the necessity of manual changes in multiple locations.

This paper introduces a novel approach based on independent, description of all orthogonal concerns in information systems and their dynamic automated weaving according to the current user’s context. Such approach avoids information restatement, speeds up development and simplifies maintenance efforts due to application of automated programming and runtime weaving of all concerns, and thus distributes the knowledge through the entire system.