Abstract. In spite of the more advanced modularisation mechanisms, aspect-oriented programs still suffer from evolution problems. Due to the fragile pointcut problem, seemingly safe modifications to the base code of an aspect-oriented program can have an unexpected impact on the semantics of the pointcuts defined in that program. This can lead to broken aspect functionality due to accidental join point misses and unintended join point captures. We tackle this problem by declaring pointcuts in terms of a conceptual model of the base program, rather than defining them directly in terms of how the base program is structured. As such, we achieve an effective decoupling of the pointcuts from the base program's structure. In addition, the conceptual model provides a means to verify where and why potential fragile pointcut conflicts occur, by imposing structural and semantic constraints on the conceptual model, that can be verified when the base program evolves. To validate our approach we implemented a model-based pointcut mechanism, which we used to define some aspects on SmallWiki, a medium-sized application, and subsequently detected and resolved occurrences of the fragile pointcut problem when this application evolved.

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Understanding a software system at source-code level requires understanding the different concerns that it addresses, which in turn requires a way to identify these concerns in the source code. Whereas some concerns are explicitly represented by program entities (like classes, methods and variables) and thus are easy to identify, crosscutting concerns are not captured by a single program entity but are scattered over many program entities and are tangled with the other concerns. Because of their crosscutting nature, such crosscutting concerns are difficult to identify, and reduce the understandability of the system as a whole.In this paper, we report on a combined experiment in which we try to identify crosscutting concerns in the JHotDraw framework automatically. We first apply three independently developed aspect mining techniques to JHotDraw and evaluate and compare their results. Based on this analysis, we present three interesting combinations of these three techniques, and show how these combinations provide a more complete coverage of the Springer 210 Software Qual J (2006) 14:209-231 detected concerns as compared to the original techniques individually. Our results are a first step towards improving the understandability of a system that contains crosscutting concerns, and can be used as a basis for refactoring the identified crosscutting concerns into aspects.

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The goal of aspect-oriented programming is to modularize crosscutting concerns (or aspects) at the code level. These aspects can be defined in either a general-purpose language or in a language that is fine-tuned to a specific aspect in consideration. Aspect-specific languages provide more concise and more readable aspect declarations but are limited to a specific domain. Moreover, multiple aspects may be needed in a single application and combining aspects written in different aspect languages is not an easy task.To solve this combination problem, we represent both aspects and aspect languages as modularized logic metaprograms. These logic modules can be composed in flexible ways to achieve combinations of aspects written in different aspect-specific languages. As such, the advantages of both general-purpose and aspect-specific languages are combined.