CorbaViews: Distributing objects that support several functional aspects

The separation of concerns, as a conceptual tool, enables us to manage the complexity of the software systems that we develop. A number of approaches have been proposed that aim at modularizing software around the natural boundaries of the various concerns, including subject-oriented programming (SOP) [Harrison & Ossher, 1993] aspect-oriented programming (AOP) [Kiczales et al., 1997], and our own view-oriented programming (VOP) [Mili et al., 1999]. Both SOP and AOP support compile-time composition. A major advantage of VOP is run-time behavioral composition, which comes at the expense of a cumbersome dispatching mechanism. The same applications that warrant the kind of separation supported by these techniques tend also to be distributed whereby different client sites see different compositions of aspects, simultaneously. The level of indirection provided by distribution middleware simplifies the programming model, and reduces the overhead of VOP.