Orthogonal persistence and AOP: a balancing act

ABSTRACT

In order to increase the productivity of the application developers, it is desirable to remove the persistence concern from their responsibility. For this purpose, the orthogonal persistence concept was introduced along with three principles: type orthogonality, persistence independence and transitivity. From an aspect-oriented point of view these principles have to be considered from the perspective of obliviousness. There is already a number of aspect-oriented persistence solutions where it is not that clear whether they handle the previous principles really in an oblivious way. In this paper, we discuss to what extent these aspect-oriented solutions really make the developer oblivious of the persistence concern. As a conclusion, we find that these systems in general defeat the orthogonal persistence and consequently, using them distracts developers from concentrating on the application logic. In order to increase the obliviousness of the persistence concern we propose a combination of two new concepts: persisting containers and path expression pointcuts.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Classes and objects

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Dynamic storage management

Keywords:
locality of join point properties, obliviousness, orthogonal persistence, path expression pointcuts, persisting containers