XAspects: an extensible system for domain-specific aspect languages

ABSTRACT

Current general aspect-oriented programming solutions fall short of helping the problem of separation of concerns for several concern domains. Because of this limitation good solutions for these concern domains do not get used and the opportunity to benefit from separation of these concerns is missed. By using XAspects, a plug-in mechanism for domain-specific aspect languages, separation of concerns can be achieved at a level beyond what is possible for object-oriented programming languages. As a result, XAspects allows for certain domain-specific solutions to be used as easily as a new language feature.

REFERENCES

• 1: XAspects Home Page. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/xaspects. Continuously updated.
• 2: Jason Baker , Wilson C. Hsieh, Maya: multiple-dispatch syntax extension in Java, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 3: D. Batory, D. Brant, M. Gibson, and M. Nolen. ExCIS: An Integration of Domain-Specific Languages and Feature-Oriented Programming. www.isis.vanderbilt.edu/sdp, Nov. 2001.
• 4: D. Batory , B. Lofaso , Y. Smaragdakis, JTS: Tools for Implementing Domain-Specific Languages, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software Reuse, p.143, June 02-05, 1998
• 5: Avi Bryant , Andrew Catton , Kris De Volder , Gail C. Murphy, Explicit programming, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, April 22-26, 2002, Enschede, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/508386.508389]
• 6: Siobhán Clarke , William Harrison , Harold Ossher , Peri Tarr, Subject-oriented design: towards improved alignment of requirements, design, and code, Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.325-339, November 01-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 7: Curtis Clifton , Gary T. Leavens , Craig Chambers , Todd Millstein, MultiJava: modular open classes and symmetric multiple dispatch for Java, Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.130-145, October 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
• 8: Krzysztof Czarnecki , Ulrich W. Eisenecker, Generative programming: methods, tools, and applications, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 2000
• 9: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 10: Jeff Gray , Ted Bapty , Sandeep Neema , James Tuck, Handling crosscutting constraints in domain-specific modeling, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.10, p.87-93, Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/383845.383864]
• 11: Jan Hannemann , Gregor Kiczales, Design pattern implementation in Java and aspectJ, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, November 04-08, 2002, Seattle, Washington, USA
• 12: William Harrison , Harold Ossher, Subject-oriented programming: a critique of pure objects, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.28 n.10, p.411-428, Oct. 1, 1993
• 13: J. Hugunin. The Next Steps For Aspect-Oriented Programming Languages. www.isis.vanderbilt.edu/sdp, Nov. 2001.
• 14: Karl Lieberherr , David H. Lorenz , Pengcheng Wu, A case for statically executable advice: checking the law of demeter with AspectJ, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.40-49, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/643603.643608]
• 15: K. J. Lieberherr and B. Patt-Shamir. Traversals of Object Structures: Specification and Efficient Implementation. Technical Report NU-CCS-97-15, College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, Sep. 1997. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/AP-Library/.
• 16: Karl Lieberherr , Boaz Patt-Shamir , Doug Orleans, Traversals of object structures: Specification and Efficient Implementation, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.26 n.2, p.370-412, March 2004 [doi>10.1145/973097.973102]
• 17: C. V. Lopes, Graph-Based Optimizations for Parameter Passing in Remote Invocations, Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Object-Orientation in Operating Systems, p.179, August 14-15, 1995
• 18: C. V. Lopes. D: A Language Framework for Distributed Programming. PhD thesis, Graduate School of the College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 1997.
• 19: Cristina Videira Lopes , Karl J. Lieberherr, Abstracting Process-to-Function Relations in Concurrency Object-Oriented Applications, Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.81-99, July 04-08, 1994
• 20: S. Matsuoka, H. Ogawa, K. Shimura, Y. Kimura,\balancecolumns K. Hotta, and H. Takagi. OpenJIT A Reflective Java JIT compiler. In OOPSLA '98, 1998.
• 21: A. Mendhekar, G. Kiczales, and J. Lamping. RG: A Case-Study for Aspect-Oriented Programming. Technical Report SPL97-009, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, February 1997.
• 22: D. Orleans and K. Lieberherr. AP Library: The Core Algorithms of AP. Technical report, Northeastern University, May 1999. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/AP-Library.
• 23: Harold Ossher , Peri Tarr, Using multidimensional separation of concerns to (re)shape evolving software, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.10, p.43-50, Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/383845.383856]
• 24: Richard E. Schantz , Douglas C. Schmidt, Research Advances in Middleware for Distributed Systems, Proceedings of the IFIP 17th World Computer Congress - TC6 Stream on Communication Systems: The State of the Art, p.1-36, August 25-30, 2002
• 25: C. Simonyi. The death of computer languages. Technical report, Mircosoft Research, 1995. ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tech-reports/Summer95/TR-95-52.doc.
• 26: Y. Smaragdakis and D. Batory. DiSTiL: A transformation library for data structures. In Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) Conference, pages 257--270, 1997.
• 27: J. Sung. Aspectual Concepts. Technical Report NU-CCS-02-06, Northeastern University, June 2002. Master's Thesis, http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/theses-index.html.
• 28: Peri Tarr , Harold Ossher , William Harrison , Stanley M. Sutton, Jr., N degrees of separation: multi-dimensional separation of concerns, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.107-119, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States
• 29: N. Wang, D. C. Schmidt, A. Gokhale, C. D. Gill, B. Natarajan, C. Rodrigues, J. Loyall, and R. E. Schantz. Total Quality of Service Provisioning in Middleware and Applications. The Journal of Microprocessors and Microsystems, 26(9--10), March 2003.
• 30: G. Wiederhold and J. Janninck. Composing diverse ontologies. In Proc. 8 th IFIP working group on databases working conference on database semantics, Rotorua(NZ), 1999. http://www-db.stanford.edu/SKC/publications/ifip99.html.
• 31: J. A. Zinky, D. E. Bakken, and R. D. Schantz. Architectural Support for Quality of Service for CORBA Objects. Theory and Practice of Systems, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 3(1):19 pages, January 1997.
• 32: The AspectJ website. http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj.
• 33: The Concern Manipulation Environment website. http://www.research.ibm.com/cme.
• 34: The DAJ website. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/DAJ.
• 35: The DemeterJ website. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter.
• 36: Java Web Services, Sun Microsystems. http://java.sun.com/webservices. Continuously updated.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Domain-specific architectures; Languages (e.g., description, interconnection, definition)

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
aspect-oriented programming, domain-specific languages, generative programming, language extensions