Persistence as an aspect

Persistence - the storage and retrieval of application data from secondary storage media - is often used as a classical example of a crosscutting concern. It is widely assumed that an application can be developed without taking persistence requirements into consideration and a persistence aspect plugged in at a later stage. However, there are no real world examples showing whether persistence can in fact be aspectised and, if so, can this be done in a manner that promotes reuse and is oblivious1 to the application. In this paper, we provide an insight into these issues drawing upon our experience with a classical database application: a bibliography system. We argue that it is possible to aspectise persistence in a highly reusable fashion, which can be developed into a general aspect-based persistence framework. Nevertheless, application developers can only be partially oblivious to the persistent nature of the data. This is because persistence has to be accounted for as an architectu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Awais Rashid, Ruzanna Chitchyan
• Keywords: AOSD 2003, Aspect-based Persistence Framework, Persistence Aspect, Persistence Requirements, Software Engineering