Smartweaver: an agent-based approach for aspect-oriented development

Abstract

Summary form only given. Proposes an approach for enhancing aspect-oriented software development considering aspects as first-class design entities. The proposal puts together lines of research coming from different fields, namely: aspect-oriented frameworks, aspect models extending UML models, knowledge-driven framework documentation and agent-based planning. The concept of smart-weaving promotes essentially an early incorporation of aspects in the development cycle, so that designers are able to specify their designs by means of aspect models, reuse parts of these models, and also provide different strategies to map generic aspect structures to specific implementations. With this purpose, we have built an experimental environment called Smartweaver aiming to support this process. The kind of assistance provided by the tool relies on the Smartbooks method, a method extending traditional techniques for framework documentation. Smartbooks includes a special planning agent that is able to derive the sequence of activities that should be executed to implement a given functionality from a target framework.