Flexible calling context reification for aspect-oriented programming

ABSTRACT

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) eases the development of profilers, debuggers, and reverse engineering tools. Such tools frequently rely on calling context information. However, current AOP technology, such as AspectJ, does not offer dedicated support for accessing complete calling context within aspects. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to calling context reification that reconciles flexibility, efficiency, accuracy, and portability. It relies on a generic bytecode instrumentation framework ensuring complete bytecode coverage, including the standard Java class library. We compose our program transformations for calling context reification with the AspectJ weaver, providing the aspect developer an efficient mechanism to manipulate a customizable representation of the complete calling context. To highlight the benefits of our approach, we present ReCrash as an aspect using a stack-based calling context representation; ReCrash is an existing tool that generates unit tests to reproduce program failures. In comparison with the original ReCrash tool, our aspect resolves several limitations, is extensible, covers also the standard Java class library, and causes less overhead.

REFERENCES

• 1: Chris Allan , Pavel Avgustinov , Aske Simon Christensen , Laurie Hendren , Sascha Kuzins , Ondřej Lhoták , Oege de Moor , Damien Sereni , Ganesh Sittampalam , Julian Tibble, Adding trace matching with free variables to AspectJ, Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, October 16-20, 2005, San Diego, CA, USA
• 2: B. Alpern , C. R. Attanasio , J. J. Barton , M. G. Burke , P. Cheng , J.-D. Choi , A. Cocchi , S. J. Fink , D. Grove , M. Hind , S. F. Hummel , D. Lieber , V. Litvinov , M. F. Mergen , T. Ngo , J. R. Russell , V. Sarkar , M. J. Serrano , J. C. Shepherd , S. E. Smith , V. C. Sreedhar , H. Srinivasan , J. Whaley, The Jalapeño virtual machine, IBM Systems Journal, v.39 n.1, p.211-238, January 2000
• 3: Glenn Ammons , Thomas Ball , James R. Larus, Exploiting hardware performance counters with flow and context sensitive profiling, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1997 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.85-96, June 16-18, 1997, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
• 4: Shay Artzi , Sunghun Kim , Michael D. Ernst, ReCrash: Making Software Failures Reproducible by Preserving Object States, Proceedings of the 22nd European conference on Object-Oriented Programming, July 07-11, 2008, Paphos, Cypress [doi>10.1007/978-3-540-70592-5_23]
• 5: Pavel Avgustinov , Aske Simon Christensen , Laurie Hendren , Sascha Kuzins , Jennifer Lhoták , Ondřej Lhoták , Oege de Moor , Damien Sereni , Ganesh Sittampalam , Julian Tibble, Optimising aspectJ, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 12-15, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA
• 6: 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]
• 7: Walter Binder , Jarle Hulaas , Philippe Moret, Advanced Java bytecode instrumentation, Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java, September 05-07, 2007, Lisboa, Portugal [doi>10.1145/1294325.1294344]
• 8: Christoph Bockisch , Matthew Arnold , Tom Dinkelaker , Mira Mezini, Adapting virtual machine techniques for seamless aspect support, Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 9: Christoph Bockisch , Sebastian Kanthak , Michael Haupt , Matthew Arnold , Mira Mezini, Efficient control flow quantification, Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 10: Michael D. Bond , Kathryn S. McKinley, Probabilistic calling context, Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications, October 21-25, 2007, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 11: Jozo Dujmović , Carl Herder, Visualization of Java workloads using ternary diagrams, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.29 n.1, January 2004
• 12: Robert Dyer , Hridesh Rajan, Nu: a dynamic aspect-oriented intermediate language model and virtual machine for flexible runtime adaptation, Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, March 31-April 04, 2008, Brussels, Belgium [doi>10.1145/1353482.1353505]
• 13: Henry Hanping Feng , Oleg M. Kolesnikov , Prahlad Fogla , Wenke Lee , Weibo Gong, Anomaly Detection Using Call Stack Information, Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.62, May 11-14, 2003
• 14: Michael Haupt , Mira Mezini , Christoph Bockisch , Tom Dinkelaker , Michael Eichberg , Michael Krebs, An execution layer for aspect-oriented programming languages, Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments, June 11-12, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA [doi>10.1145/1064979.1065000]
• 15: Erik Hilsdale , Jim Hugunin, Advice weaving in AspectJ, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.26-35, March 22-24, 2004, Lancaster, UK [doi>10.1145/976270.976276]
• 16: Robert Hirschfeld, AspectS - Aspect-Oriented Programming with Squeak, Revised Papers from the International Conference NetObjectDays on Objects, Components, Architectures, Services, and Applications for a Networked World, p.216-232, October 07-10, 2002
• 17: JBoss. Open source middleware software. Web pages at http://labs.jboss.com/jbossaop/.
• 18: 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
• 19: G. Kiczales, J. Lamping, A. Menhdhekar, C. Maeda, C. Lopes, J.-M. Loingtier, and J. Irwin. Aspect-Oriented Programming. In M. Ak¸sit and S. Matsuoka, editors, Proceedings of European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, volume 1241, pages 220--242. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York, 1997.
• 20: Ramnivas Laddad, AspectJ in Action: Practical Aspect-Oriented Programming, Manning Publications Co., Greenwich, CT, 2003
• 21: Z. Lin, X. Jiang, D. Xu, and X. Zhang. Automatic Protocol Format Reverse Engineering Through Context-Aware Monitored Execution. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, CA, February 2008.
• 22: David J. Pearce , Matthew Webster , Robert Berry , Paul H. J. Kelly, Profiling with AspectJ, Software—Practice & Experience, v.37 n.7, p.747-777, June 2007 [doi>10.1002/spe.v37:7]
• 23: Andrei Popovici , Gustavo Alonso , Thomas Gross, Just-in-time aspects: efficient dynamic weaving for Java, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.100-109, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/643603.643614]
• 24: Andrei Popovici , Thomas Gross , Gustavo Alonso, Dynamic weaving for aspect-oriented programming, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, April 22-26, 2002, Enschede, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/508386.508404]
• 25: J. M. Spivey, Fast, accurate call graph profiling, Software—Practice & Experience, v.34 n.3, p.249-264, March 2004 [doi>10.1002/spe.562]
• 26: Sun Microsystems, Inc. JVM Tool Interface (JVMTI) version 1.1. Web pages at http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/platform/jvmti/jvmti.html, 2006.
• 27: Davy Suvée , Wim Vanderperren , Viviane Jonckers, JAsCo: an aspect-oriented approach tailored for component based software development, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.21-29, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/643603.643606]
• 28: Alex Villazón , Walter Binder , Philippe Moret, Aspect weaving in standard Java class libraries, Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java, September 09-11, 2008, Modena, Italy [doi>10.1145/1411732.1411754]
• 29: John Whaley, A portable sampling-based profiler for Java virtual machines, Proceedings of the ACM 2000 conference on Java Grande, p.78-87, June 03-04, 2000, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/337449.337483]

INDEX TERMS

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

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Optimization

General Terms:
Languages, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
aspect weaving, bytecode instrumentation, calling context reification, composition of program transformations, debugging, java virtual machine