Aspect-Oriented Software Development

----------------------

Date: June 2005, 2 days

Tuition: $800 (includes coffee breaks and lunch and a copy of the course notes) 

----------------------

Background

Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is an emerging new methodology which
aims to provide further mechanisms for better code modularity, ease of software
evolution and decrease in software complexity. 

The need to develop, manage and extend large software systems in the 80's gave
birth to object-orientation (OO), changing the industry's view and practice of
software development. AOSD and OO are not competing technologies, but rather
cooperating. OO provides a wonderfull mechanism for modelling common behavior on
a hierarchy of objects. Modelling behavior that spans across multiple, and
otherwise unrelated object models of a hierarchy becomes problematic in OO
systems. This kind of behavior "crosscuts" the existing object models. 
AOSD comes to address this need and complement OO techiniques. 

Within a new module, called an aspect, behavior that crosscuts can be defined as
"advice". Furhermore, the points where the crosscut occurs can be expressed
inside an aspect, defined as pointcuts. Combining advice with pointcuts results
in common behavior being installed at the points of interest inside the object model. 
The recent technological advances of the AOSD community have produced an
important pool of AOSD tools that are being used in the developement of
industrial strength software. 

The ideas behind AOSD along with the
overall benefits that they provide, will be discussed. Furthermore, real life
example applications, deploying AOSD ideas, will be presented in order to
provide hands-on experience in both the current AOSD tools available and the
implementation of AOSD software systems. 

Course Material
===============

Lectures will be accompanied by lecture notes.
Participants are encouraged to study a basic text prior to attendance:

Aspect-Oriented Software Development With Use Cases
Jacobson/Ng
Addison Wesley

Who should attend
=================

Anyone who develops or maintains complex software systems: software architects, managers,
developers and testers. Familiarity with Java and Eclipse is desirable.

Contents

Motivation and Concepts

   What are the key concepts? Different instantiations of the key concepts through hands-on exercises.

Aspect-Oriented Design
   You can do OO design and implementation in C and in a similar way, you can do aspect-oriented design and implementation in Java.

Aspects for Debugging 
   A gentle way of starting to use aspects

Aspects for Prototyping
   Combining aspects and code generation gives a quick way to develop prototypes

AOP Tools 
   There are many tools available. We give our recommendations about these tools.

How is the Field Developing
   How should you respond to challenges and opportunities


Instructors/Course Developers
=============================

Karl J. Lieberherr
Professor 
Director Center for Software Sciences

Jeffrey Palm
PhD student and former AspectJ team member

Therapon Skotiniotis
PhD student

Pengcheng Wu
PhD student

College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University