ActiveAspect: presenting crosscutting structure

ABSTRACT

Developers must often deal with concerns that crosscut a program's structure. Understanding the crosscutting structure may help a developer understand and work with the concern. Current tools for presenting crosscutting structure suffer either from graphical complexity or a mismatch between the presentation and the underlying program structure. We introduce a concern presentation approach that overcomes these problems through a combination of automatic abstraction and interactive features that enable a developer to investigate relevant details. We sketch how the ActiveAspect tool we are developing implements this approach for presenting the crosscutting structure described by aspects in AspectJ.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.3 Coding Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Object-oriented programming

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.0 General

General Terms:
Design, Languages