Pitfalls of AspectJ Implementations of Some of the Gang-of-Four Design Patterns

For the previous edition of this workshop [8], the authors wrote a paper presenting the aims of the first author’s Ph.D. project [13], which includes the development of a catalogue of refactorings [3] for the AspectJ programming language [1]. Case studies are be used for refactoring experiments, to gain the necessary insights. In this paper, we present several considerations on some code examples in AspectJ [10] from our second case study. They look like a critique, which may lead readers to assume we have a low opinion of them. That is not the case: we largely consider them a success, and proved to be a rich source of insights. Our intent is to simply point out some problems in using the code examples, thus contributing to their analysis. This is done in section 2. We take the opportunity provided by this paper to present, in section 3, an update on a style rule proposed in the previous paper [13]. In section 4 we conclude the paper.