Aspect, Rich, and Anemic Domain Models in Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

The research shows that maintenance of enterprise information systems consumes about 65–75 % of the software development time and about 40–60 % of maintenance efforts are devoted to software understanding. This paper compares the Anemic Domain Model used by the three-layered architecture followed by Java EE and .NET platforms and the Rich Domain Model often deployed into many conventional MVC-like web frameworks to a novel Aspect Domain Model followed by the Aspect-driven design. While all these models strive to avoid information restatement, they greatly differ in the underlying idea and resulting efficiency. This research compares considered models based on development efficacy, maintainability and their impact on the rest of the system. We evaluate qualities such as information cohesion, coupling and restatement, and discuss related maintenance efforts of the novel approach in the context of existing approaches.