Modularity first: a case for mixing AOP and attribute grammars

We have reimplemented the frontend of the extensible AspectBench Compiler for AspectJ, using the aspect-oriented meta-compiler JastAdd. The original frontend was purely object-oriented. Each frontend extends Java with AspectJ and an additional set of pointcuts in a modular fashion. In this paper we give a detailed comparison of both approaches and show a number of advantages of using JastAdd: the implementation is half the size, twice as fast, concerns are better localised, extensions are composable, and computations are automatically scheduled. JastAdd provides a very constrained form of static AOP where only inter-type declarations and method execution interception are supported. However, additional modularisation mechanisms from the compiler construction community are supported in the form of demand-driven evaluation and attribute grammars. Our implementation would not have benefited from a richer pointcut language, while both demand-drive evaluation and declarative attributes were...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Pavel Avgustinov, Torbjörn Ekman, Julian Tibble
• Keywords: AOSD 2008, Attribute Grammars, Demand-driven Evaluation, Modularisation Mechanism, Software Engineering