Visual separation of concerns through multidimensional program storage
Mark C. Chu-Carroll, James L. Wright, Annie T. T. Ying · 2003
Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) has primarily fo-cused on linguistic and meta-linguistic mechanisms for separating concerns in program source. However, the kinds of concern separa-tion and complexity management that AOSD endeavors to achieve are not the exclusive province of programming language design. In this paper, we propose a new model of concern separation called visual separation of concerns (VSC), which is based on a new model of program storage. By altering the mechanisms used to store and manipulate program artifacts, much of the capability of concern separation can be captured without performing any lin-guistic transformations. We also describe our implementation of VSC, which is based on Stellation, an experimental software con-figuration management system. The VSC approach combined with software configuration management can have advantages over con-ventional approaches by avoiding program transformations, by pro-viding persistent storage of features such as concern maps, and by enabling new techniques for concern identification and manipula-tion. 1.