No abstract

When extracting crosscutting concerns from object-oriented systems to aspects, it is often needed to transform the code in order to enable the application of aspects. Although not extensively documented in the literature, object-oriented transformations are critical to turn legacy systems ready to aspect-oriented refactoring. For this reason, in this paper, we provide a set of guidelines for maintainers and developers interested in preparing object-oriented systems to the aspect technology. Moreover, we present a tool that can help developers to identify the need of object-oriented transformations. We also evaluate the proposed guidelines and supporting tool through two case studies.

Annotations are often mentioned as a potential alternative to tackle the fragile nature of AspectJ pointcuts. However, annotations themselves can be considered crosscutting elements because they are normally pervasive and tangled with business-specific functionality. In this paper, we propose a solution to the fragile pointcut problem in aspect-oriented programming that relies on non-invasive and non-scattered annotations. The central components of the proposed solution are so-called annotator aspects, that superimpose annotations to the base code in a non-invasive way. Moreover, annotator aspects are generated semiautomatically, from a declarative annotation definition language. The paper presents examples of using the proposed solution in pointcut descriptors of two real-world aspect-oriented systems. We also describe a case study that evaluates the robustness of the proposed solution in face of possible changes to the classical Figure Editor system.