This paper addresses the positive dynamic effects of the aspect-oriented implementation of database connection pooling in a web application, through simulated experiments. In addition to the static positive effects of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) in yielding a robust design by ensuring encapsulation, reusability, efficiency, and extensibility, the dynamic positive effects of AOP in our experiments are emphasized and demonstrated elaborately in terms of some selected run-time performance measures. The latter issue is the main concern of our ongoing research work.

Enterprise web based systems require an extremely vigilant management of database resources. Database connectivity is considered to be an important crosscutting, nonfunctional requirement that inevitably impacts the overall, runtime performance measures of the running web application. It is also a requirement that needs systematic resolution at the early phases of designing the web application under development due to its crosscutting nature. Database connection pooling can be seen as one of the more efficient solutions that will enhance the run-time performance of web/database transactional activities. Our work asserts that adopting an aspect-oriented approach for database connection pooling in web based systems promises for an even better improved run time performance of web based systems. In this study we analyze the run-time effects that result from applying three approaches upon cross cutting concerns of database connectivity in a developed web application. The three approaches are: An aspect-oriented approach (AOP), an objectoriented approach (OOP) or (Pool), and sequential calls to the native database driver approach (Native). The run-time effects were translated into run-time performance measures, namely, the average response time and successful hits percentage. We were able to demonstrate the added benefit of using an aspectoriented approach for this problem.978-1-4577-0476-5/11/$26.00