Representing Aspect-Based Architecture of Software Engineering Environments

The Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) has been lately explored as an approach that aims at achieving a better separation of concerns, one of the key principles in Software Engineering area. In this context, an aspect-based architecture for SEEs (Software Engineering Environments), named RefASSET (Reference Architecture for Software Engineering Tools), has been established, considering the lack of reference architectures for supporting the development of tools and SEEs. In particular, it has explored the use of aspects as a communication mechanism among software engineering tools. This paper presents our experience in documenting RefASSET through architectural views. These views have been selected, adapted, and developed to support the representation of aspects. Besides, we compare our approach with other recent works.