Multi-dimensional Separation of Concerns, Hyper/J, and The Concern Manipulation Environment
The original formulation of subject-oriented programming deliberately envisioned it as a packaging technology – allowing the space of functions and data types to be extended in either dimension. The first implementations had been for C++, and Smalltalk. These implementations exploited the concepts of software labels and composition rules to describe the joining of subjects.
To address the concern that a better foundation should be provided for the analysis and composition of software not just in terms of its packaging but in terms of the various concerns these packages addressed, an explicit organization of the material was developed in terms of a multi-dimensional “matrix” in which concerns are related to the software units that implement them. This organization is called Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns, and the paper describing it has been recognized as the most influential paper of the ICSE 1999 Conference
This new concept was implemented for composing Java software, using the name Hyper/J for the tool.
Composition and the concept of subject can be applied to software artifacts that have no executable semantics, like requirement specifications or documentation. A research vehicle for Eclipse, called the Concern Manipulation Environment (CME), has been described in which tools for query, analysis, modelling, and composition are applied to artifacts in any language or representation, through the use of appropriate plug-in adapters to manipulate the representation.
A successor to the Hyper/J composition engine was developed as part of CME which uses a general approach for the several elements of a composition engine:
- a query language with unification to identify join points,
- a flexible structural-attachment model,
- a nested-graph specification for ordering identified elements,
- and a priority ordering specification to resolve conflicts among conflicting rules.
Both Hyper/J and CME are available, from alphaWorks or sourceforge, respectively, but neither is actively supported.
Read more about this topic: Subject-oriented Programming
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