Linking business rules to object-oriented software using JAsCo

Issue title: Selected papers from the International Conference on Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, e-Business, and Applications, 2003

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Cibrán, María Agustina^{; 1; *} | D'Hondt, Maja^{; 1} | Suvée, Davy^{; 1} | Vanderperren, Wim^{; 2} | Jonckers, Viviane

Affiliations: System and Software Engineering Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussel, Belgium

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mails: mcibran@vub.ac.be, vejoncke@info.vub.ac.be

Note: [1] Funded by the Flemish Institute for the Improvement of the Scientific-Technological Research in Flanders (Belgium).

Note: [2] Funded by a doctoral scholarship from the Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium).

Abstract: Object-oriented software applications that support a particular business or domain consist of substantial core application functionality and business rules. Since business rules tend to evolve frequently, it is important to separate them from the core application. However, current approaches that support business rules at the implementation level only separate the business rules themselves and not the code that links them to the core application. We observe that this code crosscuts the core application. As a result, Aspect-Oriented Programming is required to separate and encapsulate the linking code. In addition to this, we identify several other requirements for obtaining highly flexible and configurable business rules. In previous work we conducted an experiment with AspectJ for separating the business rule links. Although this delivered satisfactory results for some of the requirements, many others were not fulfilled. This paper shows how JAsCo, an aspect-oriented implementation language combining the advantages of AspectJ's expressiveness with the plug-and-play characteristics of components, succeeds in fulfilling the remaining requirements.

Keywords: Object-oriented software engineering, business rules, aspect-oriented programming

DOI: 10.3233/JCM-2005-5S102

Journal: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering, vol. 5, no. s1, pp. S13-S25, 2005