ASCOLA Research team

Aspect and composition languages

Team presentation

ASCOLA addresses the general problem of structuring and evolving software by developing concepts, languages, implementations and tools for building software architectures based on components and aspects. Its long term goal is the development of new abstractions for the programming of software architectures, their representation in terms of expressive programming languages and their correct and efficient implementation.

Research themes

We mainly pursue the following objectives:
  • The design and implementation of new concepts, language support, and tools for distributed applications, in particular, in order to cope with their crosscutting concerns, such as distribution itself, transactional behavior, and security.
  • The definition of a model that seamlessly integrates components and aspects, in particular by means of a notion of interfaces that makes it possible to decouple concrete components and aspects while supporting the analysis and enforcement of composition properties in such a hybrid setting.
  • The investigation of the relationships between domain-specific languages (DSLs), aspect languages, and composition langages. We intend to harness similarities between these language classes for the development of more general language design/implementation techniques in order to provide new support for the transformational development of correct and efficient implementations from high-level programming abstractions.
  • The study of the foundations of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and their compositional properties by means of formal semantics for aspects (and components) as well as new corresponding analysis, verification and validation techniques.
We apply and thus validate our results in the context of significant applications in the domains of enterprise information systems, service-oriented architectures (middleware, business components), cluster and grid programming, as well as pervasive systems.

International and industrial relations

  • AOSD-Europe
  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Universidad de Chile, Technische Universität Darmstadt, University of Lancaster
  • Bull, France Telecom, SAP, ScalAgent

Keywords: Services Components Aspects Composition Modularization Software architecture programming languages Domain specific languages Semantics and formal properties Distribution Concurrency Web serv

Research teams of the same theme :

Inria Headquarters and research centres

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