Expressive scoping of distributed aspects

ABSTRACT

Dynamic deployment of aspects brings greater flexibility and reuse potential, but requires proper means for scoping aspects. Scoping issues are particularly crucial in a distributed context: adequate treatment of distributed scoping is necessary to enable the propagation of aspect instances across host boundaries and to avoid inconsistencies due to unintentional spreading of data and computations in a distributed system.

We motivate the need for expressive scoping of dynamically-deployed distributed aspects by an analysis of the deficiencies of current approaches for distributed aspects. Extending recent work on deployment strategies for non-distributed aspects, we then introduce a set of high-level strategies for specifying locality of aspect propagation and activation, and illustrate the corresponding gain in expressiveness. We present the operational semantics of our proposal using Scheme interpreters, first introducing a model of distributed aspects that covers the range of current proposals, and then extending it with dynamic aspect deployment. This work shows that, given some extensions to their original execution model, deployment strategies are directly applicable to the expressive scoping of distributed aspects.

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INDEX TERMS

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

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
          Subjects: Distributed programming

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
aspect-oriented programming, distribution, dynamic deployment, operational semantics, scheme, scope