Pluggable AOP: designing aspect mechanisms for third-party composition

ABSTRACT

Studies of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) usually focus on a language in which a specific aspect extension is integrated with a base language. Languages specified in this manner have a fixed, non-extensible AOP functionality. This paper argues the need for AOP to support the integration and use of multiple domain-specific aspect extensions together. We study the more general case of integrating a base language with a set of third-party aspect extensions for that language. We present a general mixin-based semantic framework for implementing dynamic aspect extensions in such a way that multiple, independently developed aspect mechanisms can be subject to third-party composition and work collaboratively. Principles governing the design of a collaborative aspect mechanism are aspectual effect exposure and implementation hiding.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ken Arnold , James Gosling , David Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2000
• 2: Pavel Avgustinov , Aske Simon Christensen , Laurie Hendren , Sascha Kuzins , Jennifer Lhoták , Ondřej Lhoták , Oege de Moor , Damien Sereni , Ganesh Sittampalam , Julian Tibble, abc: an extensible AspectJ compiler, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.87-98, March 14-18, 2005, Chicago, Illinois [doi>10.1145/1052898.1052906]
• 3: D. Balzarotti and M. Monga. Using program slicing to analyze aspect-oriented composition. In C. Clifton, R. Lämmel, and G. T. Leavens, editors, AOSD 2004 Workshop on Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages, pages 25--29, Lancaster, UK, Mar. 23 2004. Technical Report 04-04, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, USA, Iowa State University.
• 4: Jonas Bonér, What are the key issues for commercial AOP use: how does AspectWerkz address them?, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.5-6, March 22-24, 2004, Lancaster, UK [doi>10.1145/976270.976273]
• 5: J. Bonér. Invited talk: AspectWerkz 2 and the road to AspectJ 5. In Invited Industry Talks at AOSD 2005, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Mar. 14-18 2005. AOSD 2005.
• 6: Gilad Bracha , William Cook, Mixin-based inheritance, Proceedings of the European conference on object-oriented programming on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.303-311, September 1990, Ottawa, Canada
• 7: L. Cardelli, editor. Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, number 2743 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Darmstadt, Germany, July21-25 2003. ECOOP 2003, Springer Verlag.
• 8: C. Clifton, G. T. Leavens, and M. Wand. Formal definition of the parameterized aspect calculus. Technical Report TR #03-12, Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Oct. 2003.
• 9: C. Clifton, G. T. Leavens, and M. Wand. Parameterized aspect calculus: A core calculus for the direct study of aspect-oriented languages. Technical Report TR #03-13, Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Nov. 2003.
• 10: A. Colyer. AspectJ. In Filman et al. {16}, pages 123--143.
• 11: William R. Cook, A denotational semantics of inheritance, 1989
• 12: Carine Courbis , Anthony Finkelstein, Towards aspect weaving applications, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA [doi>10.1145/1062455.1062484]
• 13: Krzysztof Czarnecki , Ulrich W. Eisenecker, Generative programming: methods, tools, and applications, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 2000
• 14: M. Felleisen and D. Friedman. Control operators, the secd machine, and the lambda-calculus. Formal Descriptions of Programming Concepts III, pages 193--217, 1986.
• 15: Matthias Felleisen , Daniel P. Friedman, A Reduction Semantics for Imperative Higher-Order Languages, Proceedings of the Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe, Volume I, p.206-223, June 15-19, 1987
• 16: R. E. Filman, T. Elrad, S. Clarke, and M. Aksit, editors. Aspect-Oriented Software Development. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2005.
• 17: Pascal Fradet , Mario Südholt, Fowards a Generic Framework for AOP, Workshop ion on Object-Oriented Technology, p.394-397, July 20-24, 1998
• 18: Daniel P. Friedman , Christopher T. Haynes , Mitchell Wand, Essentials of programming languages (2nd ed.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2001
• 19: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 20: Stephan Herrmann, Object Teams: Improving Modularity for Crosscutting Collaborations, Revised Papers from the International Conference NetObjectDays on Objects, Components, Architectures, Services, and Applications for a Networked World, p.248-264, October 07-10, 2002
• 21: J. Hugunin. The next steps for aspect-oriented programming languages (in Java). In NSF Workshop on New Visions for Software Design & Productivity: Research & Applications, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, Dec. 13-14 2001. National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development (NCO/IT R&D). White Paper.
• 22: IBM's concern manipulation environment, 2004. http://www.research.ibm.com/cme.
• 23: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, Uppsala, Sweden, Aug. 2003. ACM Press.
• 24: R. Jagadeesan, A. Jeffrey, and J. Riely. An untyped calculus for aspect oriented programs. In Cardelli {7}, pages 54--73.
• 25: Jboss aspect oriented programming, 2005. http://aop.jboss.org.
• 26: Gregor Kiczales , Erik Hilsdale , Jim Hugunin , Mik Kersten , Jeffrey Palm , William G. Griswold, An Overview of AspectJ, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.327-353, June 18-22, 2001
• 27: G. Kiczales, J. Lamping, A. Mendhekar, C. Maeda, C. Lopes, J.-M. Loingtier, and J. Irwin. Aspect-oriented programming. In M. Aksit and S. Matsuoka, editors, Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, number 1241 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 220--242, Jyväskylä, Finland, June 9-13 1997. ECOOP'97, Springer Verlag.
• 28: Ralf Lämmel, A semantical approach to method-call interception, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, April 22-26, 2002, Enschede, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/508386.508392]
• 29: R. Lämmel. Adding Superimposition To a Language Semantics (Extended Abstract). In C. Clifton and G. T. Leavens, editors, AOSD 2003 Workshop on Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages, Boston, Massachusetts, Mar. 18 2003. Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, USA, Iowa State University.
• 30: C. V. Lopes. D: A Language Framework for Distributed Programming. PhD thesis, Northeastern University, 1997.
• 31: Cristina Videira Lopes , Paul Dourish , David H. Lorenz , Karl Lieberherr, Beyond AOP: toward naturalistic programming, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.38 n.12, December 2003 [doi>10.1145/966051.966058]
• 32: Peter D. Mosses, Foundations of Modular SOS, Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, p.70-80, September 06-10, 1999
• 33: Gail C. Murphy , Robert J. Walker , Elisa L. A. Baniassad, Evaluating Emerging Software Development Technologies: Lessons Learned from Assessing Aspect-Oriented Programming, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.25 n.4, p.438-455, July 1999 [doi>10.1109/32.799936]
• 34: Gail C. Murphy , Robert J. Walker , Elisa L. A. Baniassad , Martin P. Robillard , Albert Lai , Mik A. Kersten, Does aspect-oriented programming work?, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.10, p.75-77, Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/383845.383862]
• 35: K. Ostermann. Implementing reusable collaborations with delegation layers. In D. H. Lorenz and V. C. Sreedhar, editors, Proceedings of the First OOPSLA Workshop on Language Mechanisms for Programming Software Components, pages 9--14, Tampa Bay, Florida, Oct. 15 2001. Technical Report NU-CCS-01-06, College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115.
• 36: Klaus Ostermann, Dynamically Composable Collaborations with Delegation Layers, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.89-110, June 10-14, 2002
• 37: J Rees , W Clinger, Revised report on the algorithmic language scheme, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.21 n.12, p.37-79, Dec. 1986 [doi>10.1145/15042.15043]
• 38: Mary Shaw , David Garlan, Software architecture: perspectives on an emerging discipline, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1996
• 39: Macneil Shonle , Karl Lieberherr , Ankit Shah, XAspects: an extensible system for domain-specific aspect languages, Companion of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, October 26-30, 2003, Anaheim, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/949344.949349]
• 40: Yannis Smaragdakis , Don Batory, Mixin layers: an object-oriented implementation technique for refinements and collaboration-based designs, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.11 n.2, p.215-255, April 2002 [doi>10.1145/505145.505148]
• 41: Clemens Szyperski, Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2002
• 42: P. Tarr, editor. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Mar. 14-18 2005. AOSD 2005, ACM Press.
• 43: D. Thomas. Keynote: Transitioning AOSD from research park to main street. In Tarr {42}, page 2.
• 44: Wim Vanderperren , Davy Suvée , Bart Verheecke , María Agustina Cibrán , Viviane Jonckers, Adaptive programming in JAsCo, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.75-86, March 14-18, 2005, Chicago, Illinois [doi>10.1145/1052898.1052905]
• 45: David Walker , Steve Zdancewic , Jay Ligatti, A theory of aspects, Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, p.127-139, August 25-29, 2003, Uppsala, Sweden
• 46: Robert J. Walker , Elisa L. A. Baniassad , Gail C. Murphy, Assessing Aspect-Oriented Programming: Preliminary Results, Workshop ion on Object-Oriented Technology, p.433-434, July 20-24, 1998
• 47: Robert J. Walker , Elisa L. A. Baniassad , Gail C. Murphy, An initial assessment of aspect-oriented programming, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.120-130, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/302405.302458]
• 48: R. J. Walker, E. L. A. Baniassad, and G. C. Murphy. An initial assessment of aspect-oriented programming. In Filman et al. {16}, pages 531--556.
• 49: Mitchell Wand, Understanding aspects: extended abstract, Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, p.299-300, August 25-29, 2003, Uppsala, Sweden
• 50: Mitchell Wand , Gregor Kiczales , Christopher Dutchyn, A semantics for advice and dynamic join points in aspect-oriented programming, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.26 n.5, p.890-910, September 2004 [doi>10.1145/1018203.1018208]
• 51: J. C. Wichman. ComposeJ: The development of a preprocessor to facilitate composition filters in the Java language. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands, Dec. 1999.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.10 Design**

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.5 Object-oriented Programming
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.12 Interoperability
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.1 Formal Definitions and Theory

  F. Theory of Computation
  F.3 LOGICS AND MEANINGS OF PROGRAMS
      F.3.2 Semantics of Programming Languages

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Theory

Keywords:
AOP, AOP semantics, AOSD, AspectJ, AspectWerkz, CBSE, COOL, aspect extension, aspect mechanism, aspectual effect, collaboration, domain-specific aspect language, mixin, reuse, software components, third-party composition