AO-ADL: An ADL for Describing Aspect-Oriented Architectures

Architecture description languages are a sound and convenient approach to software architecture representation. The majority of well-known ADLs provide separation of computation and communication in components and connectors, respectively. However, computation and communication are not the only crosscutting concerns that may appear in a software architecture description. Traditional ADLs do not normally provide appropriate support to separate any kind of crosscutting concerns, which frequently result in poor architectures descriptions with highly coupled components. In this paper we present the AO-ADL language, based on a symmetric decomposition model that considers components and connectors as the basic structural elements (similar to traditional ADLs). We will show how aspects are treated as specific types of components that are composed by means of connectors. In order to cope with the separation of concerns we enrich the semantic and expressivity of traditional connectors to support either aspectual and non-aspectual component interactions.