An Aspect Oriented Framework for Flexible Design Pattern-based Development

The implementation of a Design Pattern (DP) may be affected by some problems due to typical deficiencies of Object Oriented languages that may worsen the modularity of a software system, and thus its comprehensibility, maintainability, and testability. Aspect Oriented Programming allows to implement DPs by its powerful quantification constructs that can handle better modularity and composition, helping to overcome some of the OO design trade-offs in current DP implementations. In Model Driven Development system models, defined by a Design Specification Language (DSL), are transformed between different levels of abstraction to get system implementation. In this paper we propose an Aspect Oriented DSL-based framework to specify and to apply, declaratively, Design Patterns to the system classes. The main aim driving the definition of the proposed framework is to improve the modularity, the internal code quality, and the flexibility, by allowing software designers to specify DP models with an extensive modifiability thus reducing the impact of changes related to DP adoption.