An initial assessment of aspect-oriented programming

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 2004

We present a new classification system for aspect-oriented programs. This system characterizes the interactions between aspects and methods and identifies classes of interactions that enable modular reasoning about the crosscut program. We argue that this system can help developers structure their understanding of aspect-oriented programs and promotes their ability to reason productively about the consequences of crosscutting a program with a given aspect.

1998

Aspect-oriented programming is a new software design and implementation technique proposed by researchers at Xerox PARC. This project is assessing the claims of aspect-oriented programming to improve the software development cycle for particular kinds of applications. The project is divided into three experiments, the first of which has been completed. These experiments have been designed to investigate, separately, such characteristics of aspect-oriented development as the creation of new aspect-oriented programs and ease of debugging aspect-oriented programs.

Information and Software Technology, 2010

Context: Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) promises to improve many facets of software quality by providing better modularization and separation of concerns, which may have system wide affect. There have been numerous claims in favor and against AOP compared with traditional programming languages such as Objective Oriented and Structured Programming Languages. However, there has been no attempt to systematically review and report the available evidence in the literature to support the claims made in favor or against AOP compared with non-AOP approaches. Objective: This research aimed to systematically identify, analyze, and report the evidence published in the literature to support the claims made in favor or against AOP compared with non-AOP approaches. Method: We performed a systematic literature review of empirical studies of AOP based development, published in major software engineering journals and conference proceedings. Results: Our search strategy identified 3307 papers, of which 22 were identified as reporting empirical studies comparing AOP with non-AOP approaches. Based on the analysis of the data extracted from those 22 papers, our findings show that for performance, code size, modularity, and evolution related characteristics, a majority of the studies reported positive effects, a few studies reported insignificant effects, and no study reported negative effects; however, for cognition and language mechanism, negative effects were reported. Conclusion: AOP is likely to have positive effect on performance, code size, modularity, and evolution. However its effect on cognition and language mechanism is less likely to be positive. Care should be taken using AOP outside the context in which it has been validated.

Communications of the ACM, 2001

There is growing agreement in the software community about the limitations of object orientation to cope with the problem of building highly reusable, adaptable, and extensible software systems.

Information and Software Technology

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) promises to improve many facets of software quality by providing better modularization and separation of concerns, which may have system wide affect. There have been numerous claims in favor and against AOP compared with traditional programming languages such as Objective Oriented and Structured Programming Languages. However, there has been no attempt to systematically review and report the available evidence in the literature to support the claims made in favor or against AOP compared with non-AOP approaches.This research aimed to systematically identify, analyze, and report the evidence published in the literature to support the claims made in favor or against AOP compared with non-AOP approaches.We performed a systematic literature review of empirical studies of AOP based development, published in major software engineering journals and conference proceedings.Our search strategy identified 3307 papers, of which 22 were identified as reporting empirical studies comparing AOP with non-AOP approaches. Based on the analysis of the data extracted from those 22 papers, our findings show that for performance, code size, modularity, and evolution related characteristics, a majority of the studies reported positive effects, a few studies reported insignificant effects, and no study reported negative effects; however, for cognition and language mechanism, negative effects were reported.AOP is likely to have positive effect on performance, code size, modularity, and evolution. However its effect on cognition and language mechanism is less likely to be positive. Care should be taken using AOP outside the context in which it has been validated.

2006

One of the main promises of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is to promote improved modularization of crosscutting concerns, thereby enhancing the software stability in the presence of changes. This paper presents a quantitative study that assesses the positive and negative effects of AOP on typical maintenance activities of a Web information system. The study consists of a systematic comparison between the object-oriented and the aspect-oriented versions of the same application in order to assess to what extent each solution provides maintainable software decompositions. Our analysis was driven by fundamental modularity attributes, such as coupling, cohesion, conciseness, and separation of concerns. We have found that the aspect-oriented design has exhibited superior stability and reusability through the changes, as it has resulted in fewer lines of code, improved separation of concerns, weaker coupling, and lower intra-component complexity.

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a technique used to enhance the separation of concern in software design and implementation. To implement AOP developers most commonly use AspectJ, an extension of the Java language. In order to represent the separation of concerns a new design technique is needed for modeling of aspects. Aspect Oriented Design language (ASDL) is a design notation could build on the existing design language UML. It is capable of supporting many aspects-oriented languages. This research aims to investigate where developers can use aspect-oriented programming in the software development process. This includes how to identify Aspects in the design stage, then how they can be applied in the implementation process in software development .This will lead to improve modularity and reusability of the software. The paper will be a position paper abut Aspect Oriented Software Design, also will investigate several case studies of the design and implementation of a software application that shows how we can identify the Aspect in the process.

ECOOP'97—Object- …, 1997

We have found many programming problems for which neither procedural nor object-oriented programming techniques are sufficient to clearly capture some of the important design decisions the program must implement. This forces the implementation of those design decisions to be scattered throughout the code, resulting in "tangled" code that is excessively difficult to develop and maintain. We present an analysis of why certain design decisions have been so difficult to clearly capture in actual code. We call the properties these decisions address aspects, and show that the reason they have been hard to capture is that they cross-cut the system's basic functionality. We present the basis for a new programming technique, called aspectoriented programming, that makes it possible to clearly express programs involving such aspects, including appropriate isolation, composition and reuse of the aspect code. The discussion is rooted in systems we have built using aspect-oriented programming. *

Citeseer

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is an emerging area with the goal of promoting advanced separation of concerns throughout the software development lifecycle. However, since there are many different approaches to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), it is very difficult to identify the essential concepts and properties for supporting the design of aspect-oriented languages and tools, and effectively promote advances in the field of AOSD. In this context, this paper presents a theory of aspects -a conceptual framework for AOP that provides consistent terminology and basic semantics for thinking about a problem in terms of the core concepts and properties that characterize the aspect-oriented style as an emerging paradigm to software development. This theory has been used for evaluating existing aspect-oriented languages and tools and, in special, it has been used to characterize aSide, an aspect-oriented modeling language.

2020

The success of new programming paradigm such as the Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) relies mainly on solid support tools and advanced development environments. However, the productivity is still restricted by a text-based primary input method at coding level, what makes program understanding, building, and maintaining difficult for developers. To reduce such difficulties, we propose to take the AOP out of the conventional style of coding by using a new approach, which is partially visual. The approach is intended to better support the coding process by introducing more interactivity and a high-degree of flexibility. We seek to minimize the influence of language syntax on overall usability by using the ordinary drag-and-drop technique to overcome the weaknesses of text-based style to the of AOP paradigm. Our approach has been implemented in an Eclipse-based prototype tool and evaluated through a controlled experiment to prove its feasibility and usefulness. As preliminary results, ...