Taming Heterogeneous Aspects with Crosscutting Interfaces

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 2006

Aspect-oriented software development promotes improved separation of concerns by introducing a new modular unit, called aspect, for the modularization of crosscutting concerns. As a new kind of modular unit, aspects should have explicit interfaces that describe the way they interact with the rest of the system and how they affect other modules. This interaction can be homogeneous or heterogeneous. In this paper, we present crosscutting interfaces as a conceptual tool for dealing with the complexity of heterogeneous aspects at the design level. Crosscutting interfaces have been incorporated by the aSideML modeling language in order to enhance aspect description at the design level. Moreover, we present a modeling notation for the description of architecture-level aspects that also supports the explicit representation of crosscutting interfaces. Finally, we present two large-scale case studies we have performed using this modeling language that support our arguments in favor of crosscutting interfaces.

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2010

The emergence of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) languages has provided software designers with new mechanisms and strategies for decomposing programs into modules and composing modules into systems. What we do not yet fully understand is how best to use such mechanisms consistent with common modularization objectives such as the comprehensibility of programming code, its parallel development, dependability, and ease of change. The main contribution of this work is a new form of information hiding interface for AOP that we call the crosscut programming interface, or XPI. XPIs abstract crosscutting behaviors and make these abstractions explicit. XPIs can be used, albeit with limited enforcement of interface rules, with existing AOP languages, such as AspectJ. To evaluate our notion of XPIs, we have applied our XPI-based design methodology to a medium-sized network overlay application called Hypercast. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of existing AO design methods and XPI-based design method shows that our approach produces improvements in program comprehensibility, in opportunities for parallel development, and in the ease with which code can be developed and changed.

2009

Designing crosscutting concerns (aspects) is a challenging task. Since crosscutting concerns were not addressed while developing contemporary software design techniques, so they lack support for accommodating representation of such concerns along with base program. Some design languages like UML have been extended to express aspects and their elements but they do not fully represent aspects. Some lack adequate representation of aspect elements and some lack an efficient and reusable composition technique. In this ...

2015

Aspect-Oriented Programming AOP extends object-oriented programming OOP with aspects to modularize crosscutting behavior on classes by means of aspects to advise base code in the occurrence of join points according to pointcut rules definition. However, join points introduce dependencies between aspects and base code, a great issue to achieve an effective independent development of software modules. Join Point Interfaces JPI represent join points using interfaces between classes and aspect, thus these modules do not depend of each other. Nevertheless, since like AOP, JPI is a programming methodology; thus, for a complete aspect-oriented software development process, it is necessary to define JPI requirements and JPI modeling phases. Towards previous goal, this article proposes JPI UML class and sequence diagrams for modeling JPI software solutions. A purpose of these diagrams is to facilitate understanding the structure and behavior of JPI programs. As an application example, this a...

2017

The Aspect-composition is a vital step in aspect modelling. Aspects are composed with each other and with base constructs through pointcuts defined in the aspects. Design languages address this composition by providing composition techniques and directives. However, most of the contemporary design languages lack support for inter-aspect and inner-aspect compositions. Another problem is resolving aspect interference which arises as a result of a composition. Although some techniques have been proposed to overcome aspect interference at the implementation level, the problem needs attention at the modelling level. The eradication of interference and conflicts related to aspect composition at the modelling stage could ensure better implementation and fewer conflicts. This paper provides a composition strategy equipped with new design notations and diagrams to provide support for aspect compositions, as well as inneraspect compositions. The paper also provides a technique to prioritize a...

2007

Modularization of crosscutting concerns is the main benefit provided by Aspect-Oriented constructs. In order to rigorously assess the overall impact of this kind of modularization, we use Design Structure Matrixes (DSMs) to analyze different versions (OO and AO) of a system. This is supported by the concept of semantic dependencies between classes and aspects, leading to a more faithful notion of coupling for AO systems. We also show how design rules can make those dependencies explicit and, consequently, yield a more modular design.

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) was proposed with the main objective of addressing an important software quality principle that is modularization. The basic idea of the paradigm is to capture crosscutting concerns as a programming abstraction called aspect. Since the introduction of aspects as a complement to objectoriented programming, many evaluations and empirical studies were provided to the new paradigm, including the application of a variety of software metrics in order to provide evidence of the benefits or problems with the new paradigm. There is no consensus about the impact on performance of the use of AOP techniques to deal with crosscutting concerns. The use of AOP to implement crosscutting concerns and its impact on performance is the motivation for this study. This paper explores further the evaluation of performance by proposing a systematic literature review with the purpose of finding out how performance is affected by the introduction of aspects. The result of this systematic review is that there has been few studies on scientific literature concerning AOP and performance and most of these studies are too specific, and sometimes even inconclusive. This article presents these miscellaneous results and how they were extracted from the literature.

2010

Aspect-oriented programming is an extension to object-oriented programming. It introduces new constructs called “aspects” for representing crosscutting concerns in a system development. These constructs are somewhat similar to object-oriented “classes” but they also have some clear differences in terms of characteristics. This complicated nature of aspects makes their modeling a difficult task. While working on the modeling of new design techniques for aspect-oriented technology, we have come across some unresolved modeling issues and some misconceptions about the nature of aspects and their representation in software design. This paper highlights these misconceptions and outlines some important aspect-oriented modeling issues, such as the modular nature of aspects, their resemblance with classes, and their high coupling with the base program.

2007

Modularization of crosscutting concerns is the main benefit provided by Aspect-Oriented constructs. However, current AO languages do not address class modularity adequately. In order to achieve both class and crosscutting modularity, Design Rules for AO Systems should be defined. In this work we propose a language to specify Design Rules that establish the minimum requirements to enable the parallel development of class and aspects. Beyond the modularization improvement, the language creates a simpler and unambiguous specification, supporting the development of mechanisms for automatically checking the specified rules and making easier the using of the parametrization mechanisms.

8th Workshop on …, 2006