Understanding the need of 3D UML modeling for Aspects Oriented Design

1. Understanding The need of A UML-based-
3D modeling tool for Aspect-oriented
Software Development
Jorge Edison Lascano
ESPE Faculty Member
USU Phd student

2. Motivation
• Aspect-oriented Software Development, the need
of modeling tools and techniques has arisen
• The most accepted Modeling Language is UML
• When weaving the modeled aspects in the base
models, the woven code disappears visually to
the designer, making difficult if not impossible to
verify the Cross-Cutting Concerns (CCC)
throughout the generated diagrams.

3. The solution
• A 3D-modeling/viewing tool based on UML
and AspectJ to surpass a real representation
of the woven advices in the correspondent
join points for any AOSD project in its
modeling from requirements, to analysis and
design

4. Introduction
• a tool should be capable to apply reverse
engineering to get the UML diagrams and
allow to see where Aspect Oriented is applied.
• UML diagrams do not give a correct
representation of the weaving, and they
visualized the merged diagrams as traditional
UML diagrams, therefore, CCCs got lost
visually and the developers can not track their
models.

5. Introduction
• In a 3D modeling tool, the third dimension
would be the Cross-cutting concern(s)
represented by an aspect, and the two
dimensions will be the base diagrams before
applying the correspondent advice.

6. Aspect Oriented Programming
• According to Kuloor and Eberlein, AOP
“focuses on identifying crosscutting concerns
in a system and implement them as a
collection of loosely coupled aspects.”

7. Definitions
• A concern, is a requirement of the system, and
if this affects more than one class and their
actions are tangled, it is called a crosscutting
concern.
• an Aspect, is a construct that allows the
introduction of some new behavior, the
advice, in some point of the program, the join
point.

8. Definitions
• Inter-type declarations, an aspect also may
introduce new attributes or inheritance, an
inter-type declaration.
• Weaving. The process of interfering the
common state or behavior of one or more
classes by an aspect is known as weaving.
Weaving may happen when code is written,
through compile-time, post-compile time,
load time and run-time

9. AOP support
• Haskell,
• Java AspectJ,
• JavaScript,
• Logtalk,
• Lua,
• make,
• ML,
• PHP,
• Racket,
• Perl,
• Prolog,
• Python,
• Ruby,
• Squeak Smalltalk.
• .NET Framework
languages (C# / VB.NET),
• ActionScript,
• Ada,
• AutoHotkey,
• C / C++,
• COBOL,
• The Cocoa Objective-C
frameworks,
• ColdFusion,
• Common Lisp,
• Delphi,
• Delphi Prism,
• Emacs Lisp,
• Groovy,

10. AspectJ
• An aspect in AspectJ is defined as a class with three
main sections:
• its attributes, which are a set of local variables that can
represent the state of the aspect;
• the pointcuts, which will define the points where the
behavior of the base code will be affected, usually they
are defined as executions or as calls based on a
signature that specify the set of points (join points);
and
• the advices that implement the behavior to be injected
before, after or around the specific join point.

11. Sample code
• public abstract aspect DeployingGenerator {
• static boolean isCodeGenerated;
• static boolean isCodeBuilt;
• static Object obj;
• StringBuilder sb=new StringBuilder("");
•
• abstract pointcut generateCode();
• abstract pointcut build();
•
• boolean around () : generateCode(){
• obj=thisJoinPoint.getTarget();
• isCodeGenerated = proceed();
• sb=new StringBuilder("");
• if(!isCodeGenerated){
• sb.append(obj.getClass().getSimpleName() + ", when " +
thisJoinPoint.getSignature().getName() + "ing, was " + isCodeGenerated);
• sb.append("nRead log screen to locate the errors");
• JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(Screens.frm05BP, sb.toString());
• }
• return isCodeGenerated;
• }
• }

12. UML and aspects
A logging Aspect Model using a UML collaboration
Stereotype, source: Kande et al.

13. UML and Aspects
Sequence Diagram Weaving Example, source: Kienzle et al.

14. 3D UML modeling
• There is a need to address the orthogonal
modeling of Core components alongside
aspectual components”, so a 3D modeling tool is
needed.
• pointcuts and advice affect program flow (SD),
inter-type declarations affect a program´s classes
structure”
• the weaving process, Aspects, Pointcuts and
Advices are modeled as classifiers; Pointcuts and
advices also need SDs

15. An example of 3d UML Class Diagram
Class Diagrams merging

16. Questions ?

17. References
• Kuloor; Ch., Eberlein; A., 2003. “Aspect-Oriented
Requirements Engineering for Software Products
Lines”, 2003 IEEE Computer Society
• Kande; J., Kienzle; J., Strohmeier; A., 2002. “From
AOP to UML – A Bottom-up Approach”Workshop
on Aspect-Oriented Modeling with UML at
AOSD2002, Enschede, The Netherlands, April 22,
2002
• Kienzle; J., Abed; W., Klein; J., 2009. “Aspect-
Oriented Multi-View Modeling”, March 2-6, 2009
AOSD, pp. 87-98.