Compose*: Language-independent Aspects in .NET

Lodewijk Bergmans, University of Twente
Istvan Nagy, University of Twente
Gurcan Gulesir, University of Twente
Mehmet Aksit, University of Twente

Wednesday, March 24, 16:00
Friday, March 26, 11:30

Compose* (or: ComposeStar) is a project that aims at enhancing the power of component- and object-based programming, so that software becomes easier to structure and modularize, hence easier to develop, maintain and extend. In particular, Compose* supports aspect-oriented programming through the composition filters model. In this demonstration, we focus on the declarative aspect specifications of Compose*, which can be written independently of any base language. This offers substantial benefits as a modular extension of state- of-the-practice programming languages/component models with aspect-oriented features, and allows for improved reasoning about the composition of aspects.

Attendees of this demonstration will be provided with an explanation of some of the issues of language independence and domain specific languages for specifying aspect behaviour, and will see a tool demonstrating the addition of a crosscutting concern and porting of part of the example used to a different programming language. It will be shown how to exploit the declarative aspect behaviour specifications to reason about the example for the purposes of typechecking, consistency checks and code generation. We will explain the architecture of our Compose* tool environment and the challenge of adding aspect-oriented compositions with the .NET environment. An example application will be used to demonstrate various of the above issues in our Compose* implementation.