Space-Based Development with Declarations and Aspects

Distributed applications allow people to collaborate and conduct business with partners residing in different places, countries, and even continents. Such applications have special requirements, making their development different from that of local ones, and despite existing software engineering approaches, it is still a big challenge to keep planned budget and development time frames when carrying out a distributed software project.§In order to improve on that, application development must be made more efficient by reducing the complexity of the development process. The space-based computing paradigm is particularly remarkable in tackling complexity. However, the interfaces provided for interaction with existing space-based middlewares are too imperative, too complex to be fully efficient.§By combining space-based computing with declarative mechanisms, and by implementing this with a light-weight aspect-oriented environment, we enable programmers to directly specify their distributed goals in the source code. This allows developers to create better documented and more easily understandable distributed software in less time and with better code quality features than before.