From Composition Filters to AspectJ: A Platform Specific Model Transformation

Both model-driven architecture MDA and aspectoriented programming AOP are promising paradigms that are very attractive for the software engineering community. While the former is an approach to application design and implementation using models as first class entities, the latter advocates the separation of concerns as an approach to tackle most software development and maintenance problems. MDA and AOP can be related in various ways and their combination seems to be a promising issue. In this article, we focus on the transformation of two AOP approaches, composition filters CF and ASPECTJ, considered as platform specific metamodels within the MDA context. We propose a transformation of CF models into ASPECTJ models using a syntax-directed translation and a set of transformation templates. In addition to being easy to implement, our transformation approach covers the most important concepts of CF.