Transactional pointcuts: designation reification and advice of interrelated join points

ABSTRACT

Aspect-oriented mechanisms are characterized by their join point models. A join point model has three components: join points, which are elements of language semantics; "a means of identifying join points"; and "a means of affecting the behaviour at those join points." A pointcut-advice model is a dynamic join point model in which join points are points in program execution. Pointcuts select a set of join points, and advice affects the behaviour of the selected join points. In this model, join points are typically selected and advised independently of each other. That is, the relationships between join points are not taken into account in join point selection and advice. In practice, join points are often not independent. Instead, they form part of a higher-level operation that implements the intent of the developer (e.g. managing a resource). There are natural situations in which join points should be selected only if they play a specific role in that operation.

We propose a new join point model that takes join point interrelationships into account and allows the designation of more complex computations as join points. Based on the new model, we have designed an aspect-oriented construct called a transactional pointcut (transcut). Transcuts select sets of interrelated join points and reify them into higher-level join points that can be advised. They share much of the machinery and intuition of pointcuts, and can be viewed as their natural extension. We have implemented a transcuts prototype as an extension to the AspectJ language and integrated it into the abc compiler. We present an example where a transcut is applied to implement recommended resource handling practices in the presence of exceptions within method boundaries.

References

1. Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman, and Monica S. Lam. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools. Pearson Education, Inc, second edition, 2006.
2. Chris Allan, Pavel Avgustinov, Aske Simon Christensen, Laurie Hendren, Sascha Kuzins, Ondrej Lhotak, Oege de Moor, Damien Sereni, Ganesh Sittampalam, and Julian Tibble. Adding trace matching with free variables to aspectj. SIGPLAN Not., 40(10): 345--364, 2005.
3. Pavel Avgustinov, Aske Simon Christensen, Laurie Hendren, Sascha Kuzins, Jennifer Lhotak, Ondrej Lhotak, Oege de Moor, Damien Sereni, Ganesh Sittampalam, and Julian Tibble. abc: an extensible aspectj compiler. In AOSD '05: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, pages 87--98, New York, NY, USA, 2005.
4. Thomas Ball. What's in a region? or computing control dependence regions in near-linear time for reducible control flow. ACM Lett. Program. Lang. Syst., 2(1-4):1--16, 1993.
5. Tal Cohen, Joseph Gil, and Itay Maman. JTL - the java tools language. In OOPSLA'06 International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, pages 89--108, 2006.
6. Remi Douence and Luc Teboul. A pointcut language for control-flow. In 3rd ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, pages 95--114. Springer, 2004.
7. Remi Douence, Pascal Fradet, and Mario Sudholt. Trace-based aspects. Aspect-Oriented Software Development, pages 201--217, 2005.
8. Christopher Dutchyn. Dynamic Join Points: Model and Interactions. PhD thesis, University of British Columbia, November 2006.
9. Torbjorn Ekman and Gorel Hedin. The jastadd extensible java compiler. In OOPSLA '07: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications, pages 1--18, New York, NY, USA, 2007.
10. Jeanne Ferrante, Karl J. Ottenstein, and Joe D. Warren. The program dependence graph and its use in optimization. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 9(3):319--349, 1987.
11. Bruno Harbulot and John R. Gurd. A join point for loops in aspectj. In AOSD '06: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, pages 63--74, New York, NY, USA, 2006.
12. Erik Hilsdale and Jim Hugunin. Advice weaving in aspectj. In AOSD '04: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, pages 26--35, New York, NY, USA, 2004.
13. G. Kiczales, J. Lamping, A. Mendhekar, C. Maeda, C. Lopes, J. M. Loingtier, and J. Irwin. Aspect-oriented programming. In European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), pages 220--242, June 1997.
14. Martin Lippert and Cristina V. Lopes. A study on exception detection and handling using aspect-oriented programming. Technical Report CSL-99-1, 1999.
15. Michael Martin, Benjamin Livshits, and Monica S. Lam. Finding application errors and security flaws using PQL: a program query language. SIGPLAN Not., 40(10):365--383, 2005.
16. Hidehiko Masuhara and Kazunori Kawauchi. Dataflow pointcut in aspect-oriented programming. In 1st Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems, pages 105--121. Springer, 2003.
17. Hidehiko Masuhara, Gregor Kiczales, and Chris Dutchyn. Compilation semantics of aspect-oriented programs. In G. T. Leavens and R. Cytron, editors, FOAL'02 Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages Workshop at AOSD'02, 2002.
18. Flemming Nielson, Hanne Riis Nielson, and Chris Hankin. Principles of Program Analysis. Springer, 1999.
19. Andy Podgurski. Forward control dependence, chain equivalence, and their preservation by reordering transformations. Technical Report CES-91-18, Case Western Reserve University, August 1991.
20. Hridesh Rajan and Gary Leavens. Ptolemy: A language with quantified, typed events. ECOOP 2008 -- Object-Oriented Programming, pages 155--179, 2008.
21. Tobias Rho, Gunter Kniesel, and Malte Appeltauer. Fine-grained generic aspects. In (FOAL'06) Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages, 2006.
22. Hossein Sadat-Mohtasham. Arbitrary non-contiguous pieces of computation: a new join point model for aspect-oriented programming. In OOPSLA Companion '08: Companion to the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications, pages 757--758, New York, NY, USA, 2008.
23. Raja Vallee-Rai and Laurie J. Hendren. Jimple: Simplifying java bytecode for analyses and transformations. Technical report, Sable Research Group, McGill University, 1998.
24. Raja Vallee-Rai, Laurie Hendren, Vijay Sundaresan, Patrick Lam, Etienne Gagnon, and Phong Co. Soot - a Java optimization framework. In Proceedings of CASCON 1999, pages 125--135, 1999.
25. Robert J. Walker and Kevin Viggers. Implementing protocols via declarative event patterns. In SIGSOFT '04/FSE-12: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGSOFT twelfth international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, pages 159--169, New York, NY, USA, 2004.
26. Mitchell Wand, Gregor Kiczales, and Christopher Dutchyn. A semantics for advice and dynamic join points in aspect-oriented programming. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 26(5):890--910, 2004.
27. Westley Weimer and George C. Necula. Finding and preventing run-time error handling mistakes. In OOPSLA '04: Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, pages 419--431, New York, NY, USA, 2004.
28. Curtis Clifton, Gary Leavens, and James Noble. MAO: Ownership and effects for more effective reasoning about aspects. ECOOP 2007 -- Object-Oriented Programming, pages 451--475, 2007.

Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language features