Chapter 5. Theme Design

Our focus in this chapter is aspect-oriented design as an extension to object-oriented design, an approach we call Theme/UML. Theme/UML's aspect-oriented extensions are built on top of the standard object-oriented design language, UML. There are numerous excellent "how-to" sources for object-oriented design and the UML, so we assume that you are well-versed in good object-oriented design practices. Indeed, everything you know about the subject is probably useful for you when you embark on an aspect-oriented development project.

At a high level, the aspect-oriented design process is simple. First, you design the individual themes and check them against the Theme/Doc views described in Chapter 4, "Analysis." Then, you describe how the themes should be composed and check the composed result. We divided a description of this work into two chapters. This chapter describes how to work with the individual themes. Chapter 6, "Theme Composition," describes everything to do with composing themes.