Application-specific language-oriented modularity: a case study of the ovirt project
Arik Hadas, David H. Lorenz · 2016
Despite the availability of general purpose aspect languages (GPALs) and the availability of frameworks for creating domain specific aspect languages (DSALs), tangled and scattered code still prevails in modern software projects. Through the prism of a case study of the oVirt open source project we examine the conjecture that it may simply be too costly to implement crosscutting concerns in today's GPALs and DSALs. We introduce a subcategory of DSALs, called application specific aspect languages (ASALs), that along with a programming methodology, called language oriented modularity (LOM), allows such concerns to be modularized in a cost-effective, practical way. We illustrate this process concretely for the oVirt project.