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Content archived on 2024-05-29

European Network of Excellence on Aspect-Oriented Software Development

Project description

Open development platforms for software and services
AOSD-Europe: Excellence in aspect-oriented software development

As software systems becoming increasingly large, distributed and ubiquitous, we are observing at least an order of magnitude rise in development complexity. Developers and architects must overcome the challenge of developing software systems that are resilient to change in the face of such complexity. In order to do so they must balance a number of qualitative properties, such as security and context awareness, as well as business needs, for instance, volatile business rules that may change rapidly.

Existing software development methodologies, such as object-oriented development, do not provide any intrinsic means to manage such system-wide properties. Aspect-oriented software development techniques are specifically targeted at managing these systemic properties by complementing an organisation’s existing development methodologies and processes.

Aosd-Europe is a large-scale academia-industry collaboration aimed at developing aspect-oriented software development tools and techniques suited to real-world industrial context. The project has developed a software workbench – the Atelier for Aspect-Oriented Software Development – that integrates a developer tool suite, a range of toolkits for engineering aspect-oriented programming languages and a methodology to support deployment of aspect-oriented techniques in an organisation’s existing development practices.

Other key results from the project include analytical and empirical studies of the return on investment (ROI) for aspect-oriented techniques compared to traditional development practices, and a range of training materials and courses designed for both SMEs and large organisations.

One of the major challenges facing software engineering techniques is the large gap between research and practice. Aosd-Europe bridges this gap with respect to aspect-oriented technologies by not only providing extensive analyses of their potential benefits to industry but also offering an end-to-end software workbench for practitioners to explore the use of aspect-oriented techniques in pilot projects.

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) supports systematic identification, modularisation, representation and composition of crosscutting concerns such as security, mobility, distribution and resource management. Its potential benefits include improved ability to reason about the problem domain and corresponding solution; reduction in application code size, development costs and maintenance time; improved code reuse; architectural and design level reuse by separating non-functional concerns from key business domain logic; improved ability to engineer product lines; application adaptation in response to context information and better modelling methods across the lifecycle.AOSD-Europe will harmonise and integrate the research, training and dissemination activities of its members in order to address fragmentation of AOSD activities in Europe and strengthen innovation in areas such as aspect-oriented analysis and design, formal methods, languages, empirical studies and applications of AOSD techniques in ambient computing. Through this harmonisation, integration and development of essential competencies, the AOSD-Europe network of excellence aims to establish a premier virtual European research centre on AOSD. The virtual research centre will synthesise the collective viewpoints, expertise, research agendas and commercial foci of its member organisations into a vision and pragmatic realisation of the application of AOSD technologies to improve fundamental quality attributes of software systems, especially those critical to the information society. It will also act as an interface and a centralised source of information for other national and international research groups, industrial organisations and governmental bodies to access the members work and enter collaborative initiatives. The existence of such a premier research base will strengthen existing European excellence in the area, hence establishing Europe as a world leader.

Call for proposal

FP6-2003-IST-2
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY
EU contribution
€ 0,00
Address
Bailrigg
LA1 4YR Lancaster
United Kingdom

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (15)