Reflecting on Separation of Concerns

JANE PRYOR; JORGE ANDRES DIAZ PACE; MARCELO R. CAMPO

Revista de Informática Teórica y Aplicada - UFRGS

Departamento de Informatica UFRGS

Lugar: Porto Alegre, Brazil; Año: 2002 vol. 9 p. 7 - 36

Separation of concerns continues to be a core issue in software engineering. The organisation and decomposition of an application into comprehensible, cohesive, and well-localised components is key to achieving quality software. Traditional development methods have proven inadequate for the characteristics, complexity, and scope of contemporary applications. This article presents and discusses the current approaches and tools for the separation of concerns, providing a comparison and evaluation of the results obtained from the implementation of a simple case study. As a result of the conclusions of this study, we developed a reflective multi-level framework for the construction of applications with crosscutting concerns. This framework supports: (i) the dynamic association of components, (ii) the definition and handling of conflicts between competing concerns, and (iii) planes which group components with similar functionality to enhance reuse. The paper also describes the associated tool, which allows the user to define and visualise components, generating the corresponding application code.