A comparative survey of aspect-oriented code generation approaches

Abstract

Model-driven code generation is being increasingly applied to developing software systems as a result of its recognition as an instrument to enhance the produced software. At the same time, aspect-oriented programming languages have come to the mainstream of software development due to their distinctive features to provide better modularization and separation of concerns. As a consequence of this prevalence and recognition of its impact on improving several software quality factors, different approaches have been proposed in literature to generate aspect-oriented model-driven code. This paper provides a comparative review of some existing approaches and discusses important issues and directions in this particular area. The results of this survey indicate aspect-oriented model-driven code generation being a rather immature area. Majority of approaches address structure diagrams only, a fact that limits them to partial code generation. There is a need for research that incorporates behavior diagrams, in order to achieve long term goal of full code generation from aspect-oriented models.