Efficient exploration of service-oriented architectures using aspects

An important step in the development of large-scale distributed, reactive systems is the design of architectures that effectively support the systems' purposes. Early prototypes help to decide upon the most effective architecture for a given situation. Questions to answer include the boundaries of components, communication topologies and of replication. It is desirable to evaluate and compare architectures for functionality and quality attributes before implementing or changing the whole system. Often, the effort required is prohibitive. In this paper we present an approach to efficiently create prototypes for service-oriented architectures using aspect-oriented programming techniques. We explain a procedure for transforming interaction based software specifications into AspectJ programs. We show how to map the same set of interaction scenarios to different candidate architectures. This significantly reduces the effort required to explore architectural alternatives. We explain and evaluate our approach using the Center TRACON Automation System as a running example.