Supporting crosscutting concern modelling in software architecture design

Crossutting concerns such as logging, security, and transaction, are well supported in the programming level by aspect-oriented programming technologies. However, addressing these issues in the high-level architecture design still remains open. This paper presents a novel approach to supporting crosscutting concern modelling in the software architecture design of component-based systems. We introduce a new element named “Aspect” into our architecture description language, ABC/ADL, to clearly model the behavior of crosscutting concerns. Aspect is the first class entity as Component and Connector in ABC/ADL. ABC/ADL Connectors provide the weaving points where the component and aspect crosscut. This approach effectively enables “separation of concerns” in high-level architecture design, and facilitates black-box reuse of COTS components.