Adding trace matching with free variables to AspectJ

An aspect observes the execution of a base program; when certain actions occur, the aspect runs some extra code of its own. In the AspectJ language, the observations that an aspect can make are confined to the current action: it is not possible to directly observe the history of a computation. Recently, there have been several interesting proposals for new history-based language features, most notably by Douence et al. and by Walker and Viggers. In this paper, we present a new history-based language feature called tracematches that enables the programmer to trigger the execution of extra code by specifying a regular pattern of events in a computation trace. We have fully designed and implemented tracematches as a seamless extension of AspectJ. A key innovation in our tracematch approach is the introduction of free variables in the matching patterns. This enhancement enables a whole new class of applications in which events can be matched not only by the event kind, but also by the va...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Chris Allan, Pavel Avgustinov, Aske Simon Christensen, Laurie J. Hendren, Sascha Kuzins, Ondrej Lhoták, Oege de Moor, Damien Sereni, Ganesh Sittampalam, Julian Tibble
• Keywords: Extra Code, Free Variables, History-based Language Feature, OOPSLA 2005