An Architectural Style to Integrate Components and Aspects

In the last few years Component Based Development (CBD) and Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) are gaining more and more relevance. Whilst CBD has been shown as a good mean to reuse designs and to build complex systems by the plug-and-play mechanisms, AOP makes code more reusable and complex systems more comprehensible. However, little efforts have been made to integrate both paradigms and consequently, developers are condemned to don’t get all the advantages offered by the two paradigms simultaneously. In this paper a proposal to integrate AOP and CBD is presented. The work introduce the concept of Aspect Component and it is split in two different parts: first, an architectural style to support both, functional and aspect components is proposed and second, an approach to document, search and find aspect components in repositories is presented.