CIF: A Framework for Managing Integrity in Aspect-Oriented Composition

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is becoming increasingly accepted as an approach to deal with crosscutting concerns in software development. However, AOP is known to raise software integrity issues. For example, join point shadows may easily omit crucial join points or include inappropriate ones. In this paper, we propose an extensible framework called CIF that constrains aspect-oriented software design and composition with the intent to maintain the integrity of the final composed system. CIF controls the composition of aspects and the base application in three dimensions: where the composition occurs, how the composition is carried out and what exactly is being composed. The framework is intended to be used in a team-based software development environment. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework through an application case study.