An Aspect-Oriented Approach to Design and Develop Hypermedia Documents

Abstract

Hypermedia applications can be defined as collections of interactive multimedia documents that are organized as a hypertext net. The variety of application domains and the complexity of the relationship among the application components make the design and development of these hypermedia applications a difficult process. Hypermedia design models help designers to complete their conceptualization tasks, provide a conceptual understanding of hypermedia systems and defining the relationships among system components. However, when existing document models are used, features such as logging, error handling, access control and personalized view generation are notoriously difficult to implement in a modular way. The result is that the code related to these features is tangled across a system, which leads to quality, productivity and maintenance problems. In this thesis, we provided an aspect-oriented approach to design and develop hypermedia documents. A general aspect-based document model is defined to support the separation of concerns related to the features previously described. As a result, each feature is modularized as a different aspect and, in this way, the "tangling code" problem is solved. We have also applied the general document model in a concrete case study combining DOM and AspectJ. The resulting implementation provided a new prototype dealing with many features defined as aspects such as access control, logging, view generation, annotation and dynamic event handling.