Research on Aspect Connectors for Software Architecture Adaptation

Software connectors are an important part of software architecture, which are responsible for the interactions between components, have an important impact on software architecture adaptation. The current research on connectors which contribute to enhancing software architecture adaptation is not yet mature. In this article we present an approach that introduces Aspect-Oriented technique into connectors based on the combination of AOSD and CBSD, and extracts the non-functional attributes of system as the first-class entities just like components. We also propose the definition of what we have called aspect connectors and their models by means of UML. This approach utilizes the pointcut and advice mechanism of Aspect-Oriented Programming to achieve the interactions between components, which is an effective solution to enhance software architecture adaptation. Finally, a case of printer system is used to expound the specific process, which shows the interactions between aspect connectors and components, and verified the improvement of software architecture adaptation which explained from three aspects.