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.

Programme(s)

• FP6-IST - Information Society Technologies: thematic priority under the specific programme "Integrating and strengthening the European research area" (2002-2006).

Topic(s)

• IST-2002-2.3.2.3 - Open development platforms for software and services

Call for proposal

FP6-2003-IST-2
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Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (15)