Open Modules: Modular Reasoning About Advice

Advice is a mechanism used by advanced object-oriented and aspect-oriented programming languages to augment the behavior of methods in a program. Advice can help to make programs more modular by separating crosscutting concerns more effectively, but it also challenges existing ideas about modularity and separate development. We study this challenge using a new, simple formal model for advice as it appears in languages like AspectJ. We then add a module system designed to leave program functionality as open to extension through advice as possible, while still enabling separate reasoning about the code within a module. Our system, Open Modules, can either be used directly to facilitate separate, component-based development, or can be viewed as a model of the features that certain AOP IDEs provide. We define a formal system for reasoning about the observational equivalence of programs under advice, which can be used to show that clients are unaffected by semantics-preserving changes to...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Jonathan Aldrich
• Keywords: AOP IDEs, Aspect-oriented Programming, ECOOP 2005, Method Body, Programming Languages