Coupling Aspect-Oriented and Adaptive Programming

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) enables the programmer to modularize concerns that cut across other concerns. Adaptive programming (AP) enables the programmer to practice concern-shy programming. A program is concern-shy if it hides the details of a certain concerns it cuts across, and as a result exhibits adaptive behavior. AP can be viewed as an instance of AOP in several ways, and vice-versa, AOP can be viewed as an instance of AP in several ways. In this chapter, we compare AOP and AP and discuss their integration. The benefits of the integration are: better support for ubiquitous traversal-related concerns and better support for shy aspect-oriented programming. We illustrate the coupling of AOP and AP by describing DJ, a hybrid tool of Demeter and Java, and by describing DAJ, a hybrid tool of Demeter and AspectJ.