Section 26.6. CONCLUSION

26.6. CONCLUSION

This chapter reports our experiences with the Smartweaver approach, an approach based on the Smartbooks method for enhancing aspect-oriented development, with special focus on weaving activities. The smart-weaving notion proposes an earlier incorporation of aspects in the development cycle so that developers can first specify their designs by means of aspect models and then provide different strategies to map generic aspect structures to specific AOSD implementations (programming approaches). With this purpose, we have built an environment to support this process.

A novel aspect of this work is the use of agents and planning techniques to generate sequences of programming tasks to guide developers in the implementation of applications on top of frameworks. Moreover, the agents' assistance can be extended to deal with more abstract design activities. In this line, we have shown an example in which the Smartbooks method can be applied to aspect-oriented frameworks based on extending the notion of programming task to higher-level aspect-describing design tasks. As the results obtained with the Aspect-Moderator framework have been encouraging, we are planning to consider other implementation alternatives such as AspectJ and Hyper/J in the future.

We have also described a visual formalism to specify aspect models as an extension of conventional UML diagrams. This formalism is independent of particular aspect implementation technologies. This favors communication among aspect developers and promotes a common documentation model for aspect-based applications. At this moment, a basic CASE environment integrated with the Smartweaver engine has been developed. We hope to improve these capabilities in the future, such as by adding more UML models or considering OCL to express Smartbooks rules. The final goal is the development of an aspect tool open enough to incorporate specific AOSD approaches. From this perspective, it would be possible to have a general-purpose tool and add such aspect technologies as plug-in packages. This could be complemented with wizards to collect desired functionality.

Finally, the most important contribution of this research is the provision of agent-based assistance during the weaving of aspect-oriented applications. Although a more rigorous and complete specification of aspects models and the Smartweaver approach is still a subject of research, we believe the use of agent techniques integrated with CASE tools can open new challenges in the field and can also promote more systematic aspect-oriented practices.