Declarative design pattern-based development using aspect oriented programming

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) can help to reduce crosscut- ting in the implementation of Design Patterns (DP), due to typical deficiencies of Object Oriented languages that can affect negatively the quality of the overall software system. The implementation of DPs may be further improved by using Model Driven Develop- ment techniques together with AOP. We have defined an approach to specify and to apply, declaratively, DPs to the classes of the base system. A Domain Specification Language (DSL) has been defined to specify declaratively the structure of DPs and their adoption on classes. From the DSL specifications, aspects are derived to com- pose, at run-time, an AOP-based version of the specified DPs. The approach was validated by a case study where the developed sup- porting framework was used in a concrete development scenario, and subsequent maintenance task. The results from the case study are presented and discussed.