Motorola WEAVR: Aspect Orientation and Model-Driven Engineering

This paper presents an Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) language and methodology for Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) of large distributed applications, and a tool that implements these concepts, the Motorola WEAVR. MDE technologies and development practices have been used for a long time in the industry, for the development of large critical infrastructure systems, especially in the telecommunication and avionics domains. While the benefits of MDE are established, these technologies still suffer from important technical limitations that hinder their adoption and reduce their potential benefits in terms of software development productivity. MDE and AOSD exhibit some complementary properties. Modeling enables systems to be specified at higher level of abstraction but suffers from difficulties with respect to the refinement and integration of system perspectives. On the other hand, aspect technologies focus on the modularization and composition of concerns, but lack appropriate abstraction mechanisms. The paper presents the WEAVR aspect-oriented modeling language and identifies three directions along which aspect models can help bridge the gap between system specification and implementation, while overcoming some of the weaknesses of Aspect-Oriented Programming languages.