Revisiting a Formal Framework for Modeling Aspects in the Design Phase

Abstract

Software architecture description languages (ADLs) and formal methods have been successfully used together during the design phase allowing the semantic validation of systems early in the development process. Recently, a lot of aspect-oriented ADLs (AO ADLs) have been proposed however, most of them, neglects the modeling of aspect-oriented (AO) concepts using formal specification. In this paper we present AOZCL, an aspect-oriented extension to a formal framework (ZCL) with a built-in ADL. AOZCL supports the formal modeling of aspect-oriented architectures. Besides the linguistic issues, we want to carry out more rigorous analysis of the architecture and their crosscutting concerns. To analyze the components' behavior, ZCL uses state machines. We also present the states machines of components considering aspects to realize the behavioral implications of crosscutting concerns. We use a case study to illustrate the use of AOZCL as an ADL.