Developing software components with the UML, Enterprise Java Beans and aspects

Component-based systems have become increasingly popular approaches to developing complex systems, offering well formed abstractions, strong potential for reuse, dynamic plug-and-play and sometimes end-user application enhancement. Unfortunately the design, implementation and deployment of components is very challenging, particularly achieving appropriate division of responsibility among components, designing components and implementing components. We have developed the aspect-oriented component engineering method to help improve component development by the use of aspects during component specification, design, implementation and deployment. We describe our work extending the UML to facilitate aspect-oriented component design and the use of Enterprise Java Beans to implement these designs.