Designing Aspects with AODL

There is a big gap in the level of maturity of implementation technologies and design strategies for aspect-oriented systems. Implementation-wise aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) has made remarkable progress and a number of efficient technologies have been developed but there is no de-facto design solution for AOSD available yet. Existing design strategies either provide strategies for designing aspects neglecting non-aspectual constructs or they provide complicated and hard-to-adopt strategies which are not easy to work with for traditional UML designers. This paper proposes a new design language for aspects which works with Unified Modelling Language in a single design environment. Some new design notations have been introduced for representing aspects and their key elements, and new models have been proposed to design structural and behavioural characte-ristics of aspects.