This paper discusses the requirements for aspect oriented design language in general and derives the specific requirements for the AOSDDL (Aspect Oriented Software Development Design Language) design language architecture that is proposed within this work. It has become apparent that design language research deals largely with trade-offs. For example, many of the aspect oriented design systems trade-off implementation dependency for wide tool support or limited support with general purpose flexibility.

Research into aspect oriented design languages so far has shown that no single solution will meet all possible requirements of aspect oriented software development, and thus, multiple systems for domains with different demands must be able to co-exist and interoperate. The challenge in designing aspect oriented solutions therefore is to draw the optimal line between trade-offs depending on the requirements at hand. For this, it is crucial to understand fully the requirements of a given domain.