Hopefully this is the right place for these sorts of questions, as I'm on a journey of discovery. I may still be far from understanding, but hopefully
I'm closer (it's a work in progress). My question regards the
use of aspects. GME explicitly supports the creation of aspects
for models, but it seems that such visualization aspects can only be
instantiated once -- for example, a dataflow aspect and a data type
aspect.<br>
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I have not really used tools specifically for aspect-oriented
programming, but we use an aspect-oriented approach to design.
Each use case for a particular system is treated as a separate aspect,
although in practice we handle the join points by hand during
implementation. I vaguely recall reading something by Ivar
Jacobson a while ago about this way of doing things. We also may look more
generally at other decompositions, like the flow of configuration info
through a system, or a generic algorithm for starting up and shutting
down all server processes (which is orthogonal to the data flows). To design that way in GME it seems you
would have to be able to create multiple instances of a particular type
of aspect and then weave them together according to some set of joining
rules. Have I misunderstood something about the capabilities of
aspects in GME, or am I still not far enough along the learning curve
to see a good way to do it? I'm contrasting this with the idea of using the heirarchy to segregate some aspects of the model. That allows me to separate some concerns, but it may obscure some of the details I'm trying to expose in some cases.
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<br>This is a longish question, so thanks in advance for anyone that takes time to answer.<br><br>Thanks,<br>-Joe Porter<br>Senior Research Engineer<br>Southwest Research Institute<br>