Section: Application Domains

Enterprise Information Systems

Large IT infrastructures typically evolve by adding new third-party or internally-developed components, but also frequently by integrating already existing information systems. Integration frequently requires the addition of glue code that mediates between different software components and infrastructures but may also consist in more invasive modifications to implementations, in particular to implement crosscutting functionalities. In more abstract terms, enterprise information systems are subject to structuring problems involving horizontal composition (composition of top-level functionalities) as well as vertical composition (reuse and sharing of implementations among several top-level functionalities). Moreover, information systems have to be more and more dynamic.

We have developed new techniques to debug and test such infrastructures, see Sec.  6.4 , and implemented these techniques in the context of the AWED system for explicitly distributed aspect-oriented programming, see Sec.  5.1 . Furthermore, we have also improved the way in which software is modularized, localizing its variability in independent aspects as well as improving the definition of complex configuration logic to customize software product lines as part of the European project AMPLE, see Sec.  8.3 .