Aspect] is a simple and practical aspect-oriented extension to Java With just a few new constructs, AspectJ provides support for modular implementation of a range of crosscutting concerns. In AspectJ's dynamic join point model, join points are well-defined points in the execution of the program; pointcuts are collections of join points; advice are special method-like constructs that can be attached to pointcuts; and aspects are modular units of crosscutting implementation, comprising pointcuts, advice, and ordinary Java member declarations. AspectJ code is compiled into standard Java bytecode. Simple extensions to existing Java development environments make it possible to browse the crosscutting structure of aspects in the same kind of way as one browses the inheritance structure of classes. Several examples show that AspectJ is powerful, and that programs written using it are easy to understand.

An overview of AspectJ

A number of Aspect-Oriented (AO) Requirements, Architecture, and Design approaches have emerged recently. In this report we survey the most significant of these approaches, considering their origins, aims, and contributions. Alongside the AO approaches, we also analyse some of the contemporary non-AO work in order to bring out the differences between two sets of techniques, and to understand the potential contributions of aspect-oriented analysis and design. We also provide some initial insights into processes for AO requirements engineering, analysis and design which may serve as basis for integration of the work of the AOSDEUROPE project partners. We also outline some issues relevant to such integration. Document ID: AOSD-Europe-ULANC-9 Deliverable /Milestone No: D11 Work-package No: WP 6 Type: Survey Status: FINAL Version: 1.0 Date: 18 May 2005 Author(s): Ruzanna Chitchyan, Awais Rashid, Pete Sawyer, Alessandro Garcia (ULANC) Monica Pinto Alarcon (UMA) Jethro Bakker, Bedir Tekinerdogan (UT) Siobhan Clarke, Andrew Jackson (TCD)

https://www.cs.le.ac.uk/people/rc256/D11%20Survey%20of%20AO%20Analysis%20and%20Design%20Approaches.pdf

Survey of Aspect-Oriented Analysis and Design Approaches

In model driven development (MDD), specifying transformations between models at various levels of abstraction can be a complex task. Specifying transformations for pervasive system features that are tangled with other system features is particularly difficult because the elements to be transformed are distributed across a model. This paper presents an aspect oriented model driven framework (AOMDF) that facilitates separation of pervasive features and supports their transformation across different levels of abstraction. The framework is illustrated using an example in which a platform independent model of a banking application is transformed to a platform specific model.

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An aspect oriented model driven framework

Highlights - A framework for designing process querying methods is proposed

 - The framework is positioned for broader Process Analytics and Business Intelligence

 - The framework is grounded in use cases from the Business Process Management field

 - The framework is informed by and validated via a systematic literature review

 - The framework structures the state of the art and points to gaps in existing research

 Abstract 

The volume of process-related data is growing rapidly: more and more business operations are being supported and monitored by information systems. Industry 4.0 and the corresponding industrial Internet of Things are about to generate new waves of process-related data, next to the abundance of event data already present in enterprise systems. However, organizations often fail to convert such data into strategic and tactical intelligence. This is due to the lack of dedicated technologies that are tailored to effectively manage the information on processes encoded in process models and process execution records. Process-related information is a core organizational asset which requires dedicated analytics to unlock its full potential. This paper proposes a framework for devising process querying methods, i.e., techniques for the (automated) management of repositories of designed and executed processes, as well as models that describe relationships between processes. The framework is composed of generic components that can be configured to create a range of process querying methods. The motivation for the framework stems from use cases in the field of Business Process Management. The design of the framework is informed by and validated via a systematic literature review. The framework structures the state of the art and points to gaps in existing research. Process querying methods need to address these gaps to better support strategic decision-making and provide the next generation of Business Intelligence platforms.

Process querying: Enabling business intelligence through query-based process analytics

This report reflects the findings of the JRC-IPTS study on the Video games Industry, with a focus on two specific activities: online and mobile video games. The report starts by introducing the technologies, their characteristics, market diffusion and barriers to take up, and their potential economic impact, before moving to an analysis of their contribution to the competitiveness of the European ICT industry. The research is based on internal and external expertise, literature reviews and desk research, several workshops and syntheses of the current state of the knowledge. The results were reviewed by experts and in dedicated workshops. The report concludes that the general expectations for the next years foresee a speeded up migration of contents and services to digital, in a scenario of rapidly increasing convergence of digital technologies and integration of media services taking advantage of improved and permanent network connections. The role of the so-called creative content industry is expected to increase accordingly. Communication services and media industry will co-evolve on the playground of the Internet of services, along with a product to service transformation of the software market in general. In this general context the Video games Software industry plays and is expected to play a major role. The games industry may become a major driver of the development of networks as it has been in the past for the development of computer hardware.

Assessing the future competitiveness of the eu video games software industry

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions cope with two kinds of problems within software ecosystems, namely: keeping a number of application's data in synchrony or creating new functionality on top of them. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides the technology required to implement a variety of EAI solutions at sensible costs, but they are still far from negligible. It is not surprising then that many authors are working on proposals to endow them with domain-specific tools to help software engineers reduce integration costs. In this article, we introduce a proposal called Guarana. Its key features are as follows: it provides explicit support to devise EAI solutions using enterprise integration patterns by means of a graphical model; its DSL enables software engineers to have not only the view of a process, but also a view of the whole set of processes of which an EAI solution is composed; both processes and tasks can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs; and, finally, its runtime system provides a task-based execution model that is usually more efficient than the process-based execution models in current use. We have also implemented a graphical editor for our DSL and a set of scripts to transform our models into Java code ready to be compiled and executed. To set up a solution from this code, a software engineer only needs to configure a number of adapters to communicate with the applications being integrated.

A domain-specific language to design enterprise application integration solutions

Software industry has to face up to continuous and fast changes of technology as well as varying customer’s requirements. In order to adapt software for these new platforms and technologies at a minimum cost some proposals like MDA have been brought up, but also, simultaneously, others like aspect-oriented programming are addressing the changeability of customer’s requirements. We propose the use of the MDA philosophy to raise the level of abstraction of current aspect-oriented design modelling languages, because most of them are platform dependent. Thus, we suggest the use of concern-specific modelling languages to specify concerns in a platform independent way. And, we also propose to tailor UML to the specific requirements of each aspect, so that, UML extension mechanisms (MOF metamodels and UML-profiles) are needed to define semantics of new aspectspecific constructs. Finally, a rational is given to determine which extension mechanism is the best for specifying each concern-specific language.

Towards developing generic solutions with aspects

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has attracted the attention of the scientific community and companies, as proven by the exponential growth of publications on this topic in recent years. This growing interest is mainly due to the promise that the use of blockchain enables it to be verified, without including any trusted intermediaries, that the information received from the network is authentic and up-to-date. In this respect, blockchain is a distributed database that can be seen as a ledger that records all transactions that have ever been executed. In this context, smart contracts are pieces of software used to facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation of a transaction on a blockchain platform. These pieces of software are implemented by using programming languages, which are sometimes provided by the blockchain platforms themselves. This study aims to (1) identify and categorise the state-of-the-art related to smart contract languages, in terms of the existing languages and their main features, and (2) identify new research opportunities. The review has been conducted as a multivocal mapping study that follows the guidelines proposed by Garousi et al. for conducting multivocal literature reviews, as well as the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters for conducting mapping studies. As a result of the implementation of the review protocol, 4,119 papers were gathered, and 109 of them were selected for extraction. The contributions of this article are twofold: (1) 101 different smart contract languages have been identified and classified according to a variety of criteria; (2) a discussion on the findings and their implications for future research have been outlined. As a conclusion, it could be stated that a rigorous and replicable overview of the state-of-the-art of smart contract languages has been provided that can benefit not only researchers but also practitioners in the field, thanks to its multivocal nature.

Smart Contract Languages: A Multivocal Mapping Study

Business data are usually managed by means of business processes during process instances. These viewpoints (business, instances and data) are strongly related because the life-cycle of business data objects need to be aligned with the business process and process instance models. However, current approaches do not provide a mechanism to integrate these three viewpoints nor to query them all together while maintaining the information in the distributed, heterogeneous systems where they have been created. In this paper, we propose the integration of the business process, business process instance, and business data models by using their metamodels and also an architecture to support this integration. The goal of this integration is to make the most of the three models and the technologies that support them in an isolated way. In our approach, it is not necessary to change the source data formats nor transforming them into a common one. Furthermore, the proposed architecture allows us to query the three models even though they come from three different technologies.

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An Architecture for Querying Business Process, Business Process Instances, and Business Data Models

The Internet and web applications have increased their popularity in the last few years. This boom has provoked the use of new approaches for web-based applications. These new methodologies try to address some new concerns which have appeared in this field and weren’t in traditional methodologies. One of these concerns is navigation. At the same time, it has been proved that there are some concerns that aren’t well treated with the traditional abstraction mechanisms ((functions, objects). They scatter by all the code of the program. This paper tries to join both approaches, crossing the gap between the design level proposed in the methodologies and the implementation level, using for it the proposed ideas in the area of the advanced separation of concerns.

Antonia María Reina Quintero

Papers

A domain-specific language to design enterprise application integration solutions

Towards developing generic solutions with aspects

Smart Contract Languages: A Multivocal Mapping Study

An Architecture for Querying Business Process, Business Process Instances, and Business Data Models

Analysing the navigational aspect