Expressive scoping of dynamically-deployed aspects

Several aspect languages and frameworks have recognized the need for dynamic deployment of aspects. However, they do not provide sufficiently expressive means to precisely specify the scope of deployed aspects. As a result, programmers have to resort to unnecessarily complex pointcut definitions that hinder the reuse potential of aspects. To address the issue of precise and expressive scoping of aspects at deployment time, we propose deployment strategies for parameterized dynamic aspect deployment. This novel mechanism gives full control over the propagation of the aspect on the call stack and within created objects or functions, and permits a deployment-specific refinement of its pointcuts. We discuss and illustrate the gain in expressiveness, and provide the operational semantics of deployment strategies with Scheme interpreters, for both functional and object-oriented based aspect languages.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Éric Tanter
• Keywords: AOSD 2008, Aspect Languages, Deployment Strategies, Several Aspect Languages, Software Engineering