Dependencies between program elements need to be modeled from different perspectives reflecting architectural, design, and implementation level decisions. To avoid erosion of the intended structure of the code, it is necessary to explicitly codify these different perspectives on the permitted dependencies and to detect violations continuously and incrementally as software evolves.We propose an approach that uses declarative queries to group source elements -across programming language module boundaries-into overlapping ensembles. The dependencies between these ensembles are also specified as logic queries. The approach has been integrated into the incremental build process of Eclipse to ensure continuous checking, using an engine for tabled and incremental evaluation of logic queries. Our evaluation shows that our approach is fast enough for day-to-day use along the incremental build process of modern IDEs.

Application Programming Interfaces (API) are exposed to developers in order to reuse software libraries. API directives are natural-language statements in API documentation that make developers aware of constraints and guidelines related to the usage of an API. This paper presents the design and the results of an empirical study on the directives of API documentation of object-oriented libraries. Its main contribution is to propose and extensively discuss a taxonomy of 23 kinds of API directives.

Abstract. Most aspect-oriented languages provide only a fixed, built-in set of pointcut designators whose denotation is only described informally. As a consequence, these languages do not provide operations to manipulate or reason about pointcuts beyond weaving. In this paper, we investigate the usage of the functional query language XQuery for the specification of pointcuts. Due to its abstraction and module facilities, XQuery enables powerful composition and reusability mechanisms for pointcuts.

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Language mechanisms deserve language implementation effort. While this maxim has led to sophisticated support for language features specific to object-oriented, functional and logic programming languages, aspect-oriented programming languages are still mostly implemented using postprocessors. The Steamloom virtual machine, based on IBM's Jikes RVM, provides support for aspect-oriented programming at virtual machine level. A bytecode framework called BAT was integrated with the Jikes RVM to replace its bytecode management logic. While preserving the functionality needed by the VM, BAT also allows for querying application code for join point shadows, avoiding redundancy in bytecode representation. Performance measurements show that an AOP-enabled virtual machine like Steamloom does not inflict unnecessary performance penalties on a running application; when it comes to executing AOP-related operations, there even are significant performance gains compared to other approaches.

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