Facing Crosscutting Concerns in a Middleware for Pervasive Service Composition

The emerging, ubiquitous Internet of Services scenario discloses a radical change in the process of content creation and service consumption. Thus, platforms for service and content provisioning should cope with several issues concerning mobility, context awareness and content adaptation. However, traditional programming paradigms, though proving their effectiveness in mastering a good separation of concerns, fall short when it comes to capture concerns that span and orthogonally crosscut several system components. In service-oriented architecture models that face the extremely dynamical and ever-changing above scenario, it is common and usual an undesirable tangling of functionalities which induces poor flexibility, accuracy and consistency. This paper investigates how an innovative and emerging methodology, Aspect-Oriented Programming, can address these issues in a middleware platform for ubiquitous dynamic context-driven service provisioning and configuration. We also distill some design principles and implementation details of the reengineering activities we accomplished.