Declarative Composition of Structural Aspects

Structural aspects modify the structure of a program. Like behavioral aspects, structural aspects may interact and raise conflicts. While current aspect systems mostly under-consider this issue, this work addresses structural aspect interactions under the light of an iterative composition process that involves the programmer in a cycle of automatic detection of interactions and explicit, declarative resolution of these interactions. Beyond a general analysis of the issue of composition of structural aspects and an associated composition process, this work reports on the concrete extension of the Reflex AOP kernel to fully support the requirements drawn from our analysis. Based on a structural model supporting per-aspect subjective views, and using the power of an embedded logic engine, the result is a versatile aspect system supporting automatic detection of various kinds of structural aspect interactions, extensible reporting tools, and declarative mechanisms for the resolution of interactions between structural aspects.