Aspectual services: unifying service- and aspect-oriented software development

Abstract

There is a recent interest in integrating the service and aspect oriented software development paradigms. However, most of the approaches proposed thus far rely on a nonservice based aspect model that severely restricts the language choices either for implementing the service oriented applications, the aspects, or both. This paper presents a unified development model for service and aspect oriented applications. In the proposed model, aspects are also implemented as loosely coupled Web services (called aspectual services) that can be weaved dynamically into runtime interaction events captured between service consumer and service provider applications over the network. Compared to existing approaches, the aspectual service model offers two main benefits: it improves the conceptual integrity of the development process, since no separate aspect model is necessary; and it allows aspects to be freely implemented and deployed in a language independent way.