A Safe Aspect-Oriented Programming Support for Component-Oriented Programming

Abstract— In this paper we show that Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) can be safely supported by ComponentOriented Programming (COP) by providing a way to control the openness of a component with regards to AOP techniques. Our proposal reconciles the intrusive nature of AOP with the ”black box property” of components in COP. We build a compromise between modularity and openness applying the open modules approach to components. The experiment has been achieved on FAC, our model that unifies the notions of component and aspect. We show that most of open modules principles are directly available within our approach, we then study requirements for others. Once all these principles integrated, we are able to tune the accessibility of the content of a component to AOP during system runtime. Thus, components become grey boxes with dynamic variation points accessible to AOP techniques.