A Semantics for Advice and Dynamic Join Points in Aspect-Oriented Programming

Wand, Mitchell

doi:10.1007/3-540-44806-3_3

Cited by 81 publications

(132 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The semantics of dynamic crosscuts are commonly described and defined in terms of an event-based model [27] [38]. As a program executes, different events fire.…”

Section: Dynamic Crosscutsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring and Characterizing Crosscutting in Aspect-Based Programs: Basic Metrics and Case Studies

Lopez-Herrejon

Apel

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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Abstract. Aspects are defined as well-modularized crosscutting concerns. Despite being a core tenet of Aspect Oriented Programming, little research has been done in characterizing and measuring crosscutting concerns. Some of the issues that have not been fully explored are: What kinds of crosscutting concerns exist? What language constructs do they use? And what is the impact of crosscutting in actual Aspect Oriented programs? In this paper we present basic code metrics that categorize crosscutting according to the number of classes crosscut and the language constructs used. We applied the metrics to four non-trivial open source programs implemented in AspectJ. We found that for these systems, the number of classes crosscut by advice per crosscutting is small in relation to the number of classes in the program. We argue why we believe this result is not atypical for Aspect Oriented programs and draw a relation to other non-AOP techniques that provide crosscutting.

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“…The semantics of dynamic crosscuts are commonly described and defined in terms of an event-based model [27] [38]. As a program executes, different events fire.…”

Section: Dynamic Crosscutsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring and Characterizing Crosscutting in Aspect-Based Programs: Basic Metrics and Case Studies

Lopez-Herrejon

Apel

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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“…[62,13,18,28,15]). These languages adopt either the lambda calculus or some minimal imperative calculus at their core.…”

Section: Formal Semantics Of Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But the temptation of using a rich language to develop interesting applications has the drawback that defining the formal semantics of distributed aspects is almost impossible. While the formal foundations of aspects have been laid out in the sequential setting [62,15], to date, no theory of distributed aspects has been developed. 5 This paper develops the formal foundations of distributed AOP using a chemical calculus, essentially a variant of the distributed join calculus [22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chemical foundations of distributed aspects

Tabareau

Tanter

2018

Distrib. Comput.

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Distributed applications are challenging to program because they have to deal with a plethora of concerns, including synchronization, locality, replication, security and fault tolerance. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a paradigm that promotes better modularity by providing means to encapsulate crosscutting concerns in entities called aspects. Over the last years, a number of distributed aspect-oriented programming languages and systems have been proposed, illustrating the benefits of AOP in a distributed setting.Chemical calculi are particularly well-suited to formally specify the behavior of concurrent and distributed systems. The join calculus is a functional name-passing calculus, with both distributed and object-oriented extensions. It is used as the basis of concurrency and distribution features in several mainstream languages like C# (Polyphonic C#, now Cω), OCaml (JoCaml), and Scala Joins. Unsurprisingly, practical programming in the join calculus also suffers from modularity issues when dealing with crosscutting concerns.We propose the Aspect Join Calculus, an aspectoriented and distributed variant of the join calculus that addresses crosscutting and provides a formal foundation for distributed AOP. We develop a minimal aspect join calculus that allows aspects to advise chemical reactions. We show how to deal with causal relations in pointcuts and how to support advanced customizable aspect weaving semantics. We also provide the foun-N. Tabareau

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“…In the pointcut/advice mechanism, crosscutting is supported by means of pointcuts, which quantify over join points, in order to implicitly trigger advice [48]. Such a mechanism is typically integrated in an existing programming language by modifying the language processor, may it be the compiler (either directly or through macros), or the virtual machine.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Early work on AOP suggests a strong connection to monads. De Meuter proposed to use them to lay down the foundations of AOP [26], and Wand et al used monads in their denotational semantics of pointcuts and advice [48]. Recently, Tabareau proposed a weaving algorithm that supports monads in the pointcut and advice model, which yields benefits in terms of extensibility of the aspect weaver [38], although in this work the weaver itself was not monadic but integrated internally in the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effective Aspects: A Typed Monadic Embedding of Pointcuts and Advice

Figueroa

Tabareau

Tanter

2014

Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development XI

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Abstract. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) aims to enhance modularity and reusability in software systems by offering an abstraction mechanism to deal with crosscutting concerns. However, in most general-purpose aspect languages aspects have almost unrestricted power, eventually conflicting with these goals. In this work we present Effective Aspects: a novel approach to embed the pointcut/advice model of AOP in a statically-typed functional programming language like Haskell. Our work extends EffectiveAdvice, by Oliveira, Schrijvers and Cook; which lacks quantification, and explores how to exploit the monadic setting in the full pointcut/advice model. Type soundness is guaranteed by exploiting the underlying type system, in particular phantom types and a new anti-unification type class. Aspects are first-class, can be deployed dynamically, and the pointcut language is extensible, therefore combining the flexibility of dynamically-typed aspect languages with the guarantees of a static type system. Monads enables us to directly reason about computational effects both in aspects and base programs using traditional monadic techniques. Using this we extend Aldrich's notion of Open Modules with effects, and also with protected pointcut interfaces to external advising. These restrictions are enforced statically using the type system. Also, we adapt the techniques of EffectiveAdvice to reason about and enforce control flow properties. Moreover, we show how to control effect interference using the parametricity-based approach of EffectiveAdvice. However this approach falls short when dealing with interference between multiple aspects. We propose a different approach using monad views, a recently developed technique for handling the monad stack. Finally, we exploit the properties of our monadic weaver to enable the modular construction of new semantics for aspect scoping and weaving. These semantics also benefit fully from the monadic reasoning mechanisms present in the language. This work brings type-based reasoning about effects for the first time in the pointcut/advice model, in a framework that is both expressive and extensible; thus allowing development of robust aspect-oriented systems as well as being a useful research tool for experimenting with new aspect semantics.

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A Semantics for Advice and Dynamic Join Points in Aspect-Oriented Programming

Cited by 81 publications

References 12 publications

Measuring and Characterizing Crosscutting in Aspect-Based Programs: Basic Metrics and Case Studies

Measuring and Characterizing Crosscutting in Aspect-Based Programs: Basic Metrics and Case Studies

Chemical foundations of distributed aspects

Effective Aspects: A Typed Monadic Embedding of Pointcuts and Advice

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