Supporting Adaptability and Modularity of System Software

It is difficult to design system software to meet a better separation of concerns, which can provide a number of benefits such as adaptability, extensibility, and modularity in the design and implementation. During design, some aspectual properties, such as synchronization, scheduling, performance and fault tolerance, crosscut the basic functionalities of the system software. By separating functional components from the different aspectual components of the system software in the design, we can provide a better generic design model of system software. Aspect-Oriented Programming is a methodology that aims at separating components and aspects from the early stages of the software life cycle, and using techniques to combining them together at the implementation phase. In this paper we discuss an aspect-oriented framework that can simplify system software design and implementation by expressing it at a higher level of abstraction. Our work concentrates on how to achieve a higher separation of aspectual components, functional components, and layers from each other. Our goal is to achieve a better design model for implementing system software in terms of modularity, reusability and adaptability.