Aspect-oriented application-level scheduling for J2EE servers

Abstract

Achieving sufficient execution performance is a challenging goal of software development. Unfortunately, violating performance requirements is often revealed at a late stage of the development. Fixing a performance problem at such a late stage is difficult in terms of cost and time. To solve this problem, this paper presents QoSWeaver, which provides aspect-oriented application-level scheduling. QoSWeaver weaves scheduling code written in an aspect into application code. The scheduling code gets an application thread to voluntarily yield its execution to implement a scheduling policy. The idea of scheduling at the application level is not new, but aspect-oriented programming makes it more realistic by separation of scheduling code. QoSWeaver also provides a profile-based pointcut generator, which automatically generates pointcuts for fine-grained scheduling. To investigate the ability of QoSWeaver for implementing practical scheduling policies, we used QoSWeaver for tuning the performance of a river monitoring system named Kasendas. For reliable examination, Kasendas was originally developed by an outside corporation and then it was tuned by the authors with QoSWeaver. The authors could successfully improve the performance of Kasendas under heavy workload and the work of the performance tuning was not large.

Model-driven development for early aspects

“…The improvement on modularization due to the use of aspect-orientation is valid only if aspect-orientation fulfils its promise of being able to encapsulate a crosscutting concern in a single module. Whereas some works have demonstrated that concerns such as Persistence [87], Scheduling [69], Context-Awareness [101];), Distribution [97] or Coordination [40], among others [75], can be adequately modularized in a single module using aspects, aspect-orientation should not be considered the Holy Grail in Software Engineering, as there are still some challenges to separate any kind of crosscutting concern, as discussed in [65]; Kienzle and Gélinau, 2006). So, if aspect-orientation fails on adequately encapsulating a crosscutting concern into a single module, the benefits of using aspect-oriented techniques at the architectural level would be limited, for that concern, to the automation provided to model-driven techniques, but the benefits regarding improvement on maintenance and evolution would be lost.…”

Aspect-oriented design and implementation of context-aware pervasive applications

“…Whereas some works have demonstrated that concerns such as persistence [38], scheduling [26], context-awareness [46], distribution [44] or coordination [15], among others [30], can be adequately modularized in a single module using aspects, there are some crosscutting concerns, such as transactions [22,23] whose proper encapsulation into an aspect still remains a challenge for aspect-oriented techniques.…”

Aspect-Oriented Coordination

“…Additionally, the linguistic support for aspect-orientations can also be used to implement adaptors [6,12] and/or to separate other crosscutting concerns, such as Persistence [33] or Scheduling [23], among others [24]. However, at the current moment, Aspect-Orientation should not be considered the Holy Grail to separate easily any kind of crosscutting concern, as there are still some challenges to solve [22,21].…”