Assessing Contemporary Modularization Techniques for Middleware Specialization

Middleware specialization is a technique to prune middleware features that are deemed unnecessary by the application domain, and to optimize and customize the relevant features to obtain domainspecific semantics within the middleware. Although contemporary modularization techniques, such as aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and feature-oriented programming (FOP), have been used in middleware specialization, there is a lack of a taxonomy that can assess the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques. To address these limitations, this paper develops a taxonomy that organizes contemporary modularization approaches applied to the problem of middleware specialization within a unified framework. The taxonomy helps assess the applicability of multiple modularization techniques used in concert for specializing system software such as middleware.