Section 25.10. CONCLUSION

25.10. CONCLUSION

We have been working on using the concept of an "aspect"a piece of crosscutting systemic functionalityto clearly identify the impact of these concerns on parts of software components and on providing tools to enable developers to represent aspects using augmented component specification and design diagrams. These extended component descriptions allow developers to more easily reason about inter-component provided and required functionality and constraints. We have found that these aspect characterizations provide a useful way of decoupling implemented component interaction. They also provide a practical component description approach. Using encodings of aspect information and making these available at runtime enables more sophisticated component introspection and dynamic component adaptation. It also enables doing better component dynamic validation, storage, and plug-and-play. Developers must balance the potential advantages of this approach with the overhead of describing aspects for components.