Flexible calling context reification for aspect-oriented programming

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) eases the development of profilers, debuggers, and reverse engineering tools. Such tools frequently rely on calling context information. However, current AOP technology, such as AspectJ, does not offer dedicated support for accessing complete calling context within aspects. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to calling context reification that reconciles flexibility, efficiency, accuracy, and portability. It relies on a generic bytecode instrumentation framework ensuring complete bytecode coverage, including the standard Java class library. We compose our program transformations for calling context reification with the AspectJ weaver, providing the aspect developer an efficient mechanism to manipulate a customizable representation of the complete calling context. To highlight the benefits of our approach, we present ReCrash as an aspect using a stack-based calling context representation; ReCrash is an existing tool that generates unit tests ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Alex Villazón, Walter Binder, Philippe Moret
• Keywords: AOSD 2009, Calling Context, Complete Calling Context, Context Reification, Software Engineering