Visual Separation of Concerns Through Multidimensional Program Storage

Abstract

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) has primarily focused on linguistic and meta-linguistic mechanisms for separating concerns in program source. However, the kinds of concern separation and complexity management that AOSD endeavors to achieve are not the exclusive province of programming language design. In this paper, we propose a new model of concern separation called visual separation of concerns (VSC), which is based on a new model of program storage. By altering the mechanisms used to store and manipulate program artifacts, much of the capability of concern separation can be captured without performing any linguistic transformations. We also describe our implementation of VSC, which is based on Stellation, an experimental software configuration management system. The VSC approach combined with software configuration management can have advantages over conventional approaches by avoiding program transformations, by providing persistent storage of features such as concern maps, and by enabling new techniques for concern identification and manipulation.