Specifying and composing concerns expressed in domain-specific modeling languages
Aram Hovsepyan, Stefan Van Baelen, Yolande Berbers, Wouter Joosen · 2009
kuleuven.be Summary. Separation of concerns and levels of abstraction are key soft-ware engineering principles that can help master the increasing com-plexity of software applications. Aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) and domain-specific modeling languages (DSML) are two important and promising approaches in this context. However, little research is done to investigate the synergy between AOM and DSMLs. In this paper we present an asymmetric approach to compose modularized concerns ex-pressed in different DSMLs with an application base model expressed in a general-purpose modeling language (GPML). This allows to specify each concern in the most appropriate modeling language. We introduce the concept of a concern interface, expressed in a GPML, that serves as a common language between a specific concern and the application base. In addition, we use an explicit composition model to specify the syntactic and the semantic links between entities from the different concerns. We explore these concepts using an application where we modularize the user interface modeled in WebML and the access control specified in XACML. The modularized concerns are then composed with an application base that has been specified in UML. 1