A Framework for the Detection and Resolution of Aspect Interactions

Abstract

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) promises separation of concerns at the implementation level. However, aspects are not always orthogonal and aspect interaction is an important problem. Currently there is almost no support for the detection and resolution of such interactions. The programmer is responsible for identifying interactions between conflicting aspects and implementing conflict resolution code. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem based on a generic framework for AOP. The contributions are threefold: we present a formal and expressive crosscut language, two static conflict analyses and some linguistic support for conflict resolution. 1. Programming. The aspects which are part of an application are written independently, possibly by different programmers. 2. Conflict analysis. An automatic tool detects interactions among aspects and returns informative results to the programmer.

Aspect Composition in the Motorola Aspect-Oriented Modeling Weaver.

“…Some other approaches extend the simple precedence declaration and introduce more complex dependencies and ordering relationships between aspects, such as [Kienzle03,Nagy]. Aspect interactions can be identified through static analysis on the crosscutting concerns and the base module [Douence02,Stoerzer06]. Advanced approaches require extra behavior specifications from the user for each advice [Durr, Pawlak] or each aspect [Lagaisse, Sihman].…”

Designing and Weaving Aspect-Oriented Executable UML Models.

“…In this case, the execution ordering of advices might be important to ensure the correctness of the application [12]. To solve this issue, our approach implements a simple mechanism: each advice has an integer assigned that is unique for all the advices in the model.…”

Invasive Patterns for Distributed Programs

“…Once all relevant data has been passed to the right hand side node, a "target" advice is used to integrate the transmitted data with an existing or new computation on the target node. In order to support the declarative definition of such crosscutting accesses, we leverage results on so-called stateful pointcut languages [13] that enable matching of sequences of execution events to be defined using expressive languages, in particular finite-state automata.…”

“…Following the paradigm of stateful pointcuts [13,6] (and unlike AspectJ [4,19]) pointcuts may match sequences (non-terminal Seq) of calls in the base program execution. We omit the syntax of sequences for now, but they are basically defined in terms of a finite-state automaton by declaring its states and by labelling state transitions with pointcuts.…”