Blueprint: a High-level Pattern Based Aop Language Blueprint: a High-level Pattern Based Aop Language Title: Blueprint: a High-level Pattern Based Aop Language Acknowledgements

Nowadays, aspect-oriented techniques are widely used to better modularize object-oriented programs by introducing crosscutting concerns in a safe and non invasive way, i.e., aspect-oriented mechanisms better address the modularization of functionality that orthogonally crosscut the implementation of the application. The high modularization is done by three main concepts: encapsulation of crosscutting concerns in a modular unit (the aspect), selection of the exact point where the concern should be inserted (join point selection or pointcut) and insertion of the concern into the selected join points (the weaving mechanism). Unfortunately, as noted by several researchers, most of the current aspect-oriented approaches are too coupled with the application code, and this fact hinders the concerns separability and consequently their re-usability since each aspect is strictly tailored on the base application. Moreover, the join points, i.e. the locations affected by a crosscutting concerns, actually are defined at operation level. It implies that the possible set of join points includes every operation (e.g., method invocations) that the system performs. Whereas, in many contexts we wish to define aspects that are expected to work at the statement level, i.e., by considering as a join point every point between two generic statements (i.e., lines of code). This proposal should overcome the above described limitations of current aspect-oriented approaches, by introducing a new model for the join points, and a new mechanism to select these join points, as more as possible decoupled from the application code. Our proposal, called Blueprint, consists of a new aspect-oriented programming language based on modeling the join point selection mechanism at a high level of abstraction to decouple aspects from the base program. To this regard, we propose a high level pattern based join point model, where join points are described by means of join point blueprints, i.e. computational and behavioral patterns describing where the join point should be found. In other words, we use a sort of UML diagrams to describe the control flows of the computational patterns and where are the join points inside these blueprints to detect potential woven points. This thesis is dedicated to my parents and my husband, without whom none of this would have been even possible.