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

Model-driven engineering technologies offer a promising approach to address the inability of third-generation languages to alleviate the complexity of platforms and express domain concepts effectively.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Model-Driven Engineering

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are languages tailored to a specific application domain. They offer substantial gains in expressiveness and ease of use compared with general-purpose programming languages in their domain of application. DSL development is hard, requiring both domain knowledge and language development expertise. Few people have both. Not surprisingly, the decision to develop a DSL is often postponed indefinitely, if considered at all, and most DSLs never get beyond the application library stage.Although many articles have been written on the development of particular DSLs, there is very limited literature on DSL development methodologies and many questions remain regarding when and how to develop a DSL. To aid the DSL developer, we identify patterns in the decision, analysis, design, and implementation phases of DSL development. Our patterns improve and extend earlier work on DSL design patterns. We also discuss domain analysis tools and language development systems that may help to speed up DSL development. Finally, we present a number of open problems.

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When and how to develop domain-specific languages

Feature models are used to specify members of a product-line. Despite years of progress, contemporary tools often provide limited support for feature constraints and offer little or no support for debugging feature models. We integrate prior results to connect feature models, grammars, and propositional formulas. This connection allows arbitrary propositional constraints to be defined among features and enables off-the-shelf satisfiability solvers to debug feature models. We also show how our ideas can generalize recent results on the staged configuration of feature models.

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Feature models, grammars, and propositional formulas

Systems and methods are provided for receiving speech and non-speech communications of natural language questions and/or commands, transcribing the speech and non-speech communications to textual messages, and executing the questions and/or commands. The invention applies context, prior information, domain knowledge, and user specific profile data to achieve a natural environment for one or more users presenting questions or commands across multiple domains. The systems and methods creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context of the speech and non-speech communications and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command.

Systems and methods for responding to natural language speech utterance

A server federation cooperatively interacts to fulfill service requests by communicating using data structures that follow a schema in which the meaning of the communicated data is implied by the schema. Thus, in addition to the data being communicated, the meaning of the data is also communicated allowing for intelligent decisions and inferences to be made based on the meaning of the data. Cooperative interaction is facilitated over a wide variety of networks by messaging through a common API that supports multiple transport mechanisms. Also, mid-session transfer between client devices is facilitated by schema and the transport-independent messaging structure. The user interfaces of the client devices will appear consistent even if the client devices have different user interface capabilities.

Distributed computing services platform

The confluence of component based development, model driven development and software product lines forms an approach to application development based on the concept of software factories. This approach promises greater gains in productivity and predictability than those produced by incremental improvements to the current paradigm of object orientation, which have not kept pace with innovation in platform technology. Software factories promise to make application assembly more cost effective through systematic reuse, enabling the formation of supply chains and opening the door to mass customization.

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Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools

In one embodiment, tables are created in such a way that allows rich querying using standard database routines and other tools. This is accomplished by providing developers and repository users with a set of schema guidelines that describe how the software related items are to be categorized in the tables and how to use such tables for rich querying. For example, one such guideline provides for course-grained versioning of items (e.g., artifacts, metadata, etc.)—as opposed to the fine grained object principle of unit change found in most repository systems such as the entity-property-value scheme. The developers or providers then use these guidelines to optimally categorize, in a natural way, their metadata and other software related items for storing copies thereof in the repository.

Easily queriable software repositories

The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for a declarative model security pattern for use in a database. Declarative language code can include a declared access control predicate and a separately declared data structure definition bound to the access control predicate. A portion of the database is instantiated from the declarative language code. The instantiated portion of the database includes one or more tables and a view of the one or more tables. A database management system enforces the access control predicate by dynamically calculating a value for the access control predicate and using the dynamically calculated value to define what operations may be performed on data in the one or more tables via the view.

Declarative model security pattern

The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for modeling party identities in computer storage systems. A federated identity fabric models identity data and relationships between portions of indentify data in computer storage systems in accordance with a uniform schema. The federated identity fabric can federate distributed identity and identity relationship data from computer storage systems within the variety of different computing environments. Code and metadata at computing environments associated with the federated identity fabric can interoperate to facilitate uniformly storing, accessing, modifying, deleting, and securing identity and identity relationship data within the federated identify fabric. Embodiments of the invention include utilizing an identity key table entry to locate party identity information and performing key transformations between different types of identity keys.

Keith W. Short

Papers

Distributed computing services platform

Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools

Easily queriable software repositories

Declarative model security pattern

Modeling party identities in computer storage systems