Association aspects

We propose a linguistic mechanism for AspectJ-like languages that concisely associates aspect instances to object groups. The mechanism, which supports association aspects, extends the per-object aspects in AspectJ by allowing an aspect instance to be associated to a group of objects, and by providing a new pointcut primitive to specify aspect instances as execution contexts of advice. With association aspects, we can straightforwardly implement crosscutting concerns that have stateful behavior related to a particular group of objects. The new pointcut primitive can more flexibly specify aspect instances when compared against previous implicit mechanisms. The comparison of execution times between the programs with association aspects and the ones with regular AspectJ aspects revealed that the association aspects exhibited almost equivalent for the medium-sized configurations.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Kouhei Sakurai, Hidehiko Masuhara, Naoyasu Ubayashi, Saeko Matsuura, Seiichi Komiya
• Keywords: AOSD 2004, Aspect Instances, Association Aspects, Per-object Aspects, Software Engineering