Supporting aspect-oriented component-based systems engineering

Current approaches to component-based systems development do not adequately capture high-level knowledge about component provided and required services for use during design, implementation and run-time deployment. We describe a new approach to engineering such systems that characterises components by the various "aspects " of the overall system each component provides to or requires from end users or other components. These aspects include user interface, persistency, distribution, collaboration, inter-component relationships. Appropriate software architecture and CASE tool support is needed in order to effectively describe, reason about and implement this encoding of high level knowledge about components. We motivate the need for aspect-oriented component engineering, describe and illustrate our approach and its current software architecture and development tool support, and report on our component-based system development experiences. 1.