About the journal

• Home page
• Contact information
• Aims and scope
• Indexing information
• Editorial policies
• ComSIS consortium
• Journal boards
• Managing board

For authors

• Information for contributors
• Paper submission
• Article submission through OJS
• Copyright transfer form
• Download section

For readers

• Forthcoming articles
• Current issue
• Archive

For reviewers

• View and review submissions

News

• Journal's Facebook page
• Calls for special issues
• New issue notification

On Interplay between Separation of Concerns and Genericity Principles: Beyond Code Weaving

Stan Jarzabek¹ and Kuldeep Kumar²

1. Faculty of Computer Science
   Bialystok University of Technology, Poland
   s.jarzabek@pb.edu.pl
2. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
   Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India
   kuldeep.kumar@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in

Abstract

Ideally, we would separate concerns by designing a program so that each concern is contained in a module. Unfortunately, we often have to deal with concerns that cannot be modularized, but instead cross-cut modules of our primary decomposition. Some of the cross-cutting concerns can be separated using compositional techniques such as Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) that weave code into modules at specified program points. Here, we focus on crosscutting concerns that would not be easily separable with code weaving compositional techniques due to their frequent and complex interactions with the modules of primary decomposition. Separation of Concerns (SoC) and genericity are two important Software Engineering principles to better control software complexity during development, maintenance, and reuse. In this paper, we study the interplay between these two principles, showing that there is an overlapping area where the goals of SoC and genericity, as well as means to achieve these goals, are the same. We make a case that by integrating the principles of SoC and genericity we can achieve non-redundancy, and at the same time enhance the visibility of inseparable concerns, offering a weaker, but still useful form of SoC. We illustrate the points we make with examples of program representations built with the Adaptive Reuse Technique (ART) that supports both SoC and generic mechanisms.

Key words

generic design, separation of concerns, software reuse, maintenance, component-based development, generative programming, meta-programming

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS160129028J

Publication information

Volume 13, Issue 3 (November 2016)
Special issue on Trends in Software Technologies
Year of Publication: 2016
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

Full text

Available in PDF
Portable Document Format

How to cite

Jarzabek, S., Kumar, K.: On Interplay between Separation of Concerns and Genericity Principles: Beyond Code Weaving. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 13, No. 3, 731–758. (2016), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS160129028J