D10: C-SAW and GenAWeave: Tools to Assist in Weaving Across Multiple Artifacts at Different Levels of Abstraction

Jeff Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Suman Roychoudhury, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Jing Zhang, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Yuehua Lin, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Wednesday, March 16, 16:30
Friday, March 18, 13:15

The C-SAW and GenAWeave tools support evolution of legacy software through a two-level approach using aspects. The principle strategy of these tools is to generate low-level transformation rules from higher-level domain languages. The demonstration will show the ability to make rapid adaptations to a large cross- section of an application through simple specification changes at a high-level of abstraction. As case studies, the demonstration will highlight the transformation of two legacy commercial applications: a large mission-computing avionics framework written in C++, and a client-server enterprise management system implemented in Object Pascal. In the avionics application, transformation rules are generated from domain-specific models created in the Generic Modeling Environment (from Vanderbilt University). Using C-SAW, it will be shown that small changes in a representative model can regulate concurrency and logging policies across many C++ classes. The Object Pascal portion of the demonstration will illustrate the use of a program transformation system (the Design Maintenance System) as the underlying engine for an aspect weaver. A unique feature of the demonstration is the ability to weave aspects into various legacy languages (not just Java) at the source level using GenAWeave.