Formalizing Reusable Aspect-Oriented Concurrency Control

Java and its library provide powerful concurrency control mechanisms. However, their use can lead to similar synchronization code being scattered across multiple classes, synchronization and functional code being tangled together, and similar code being duplicated in many applications. Aspect-oriented (AO) programming makes it possible to address these problems. The precise behavior of systems built using AO techniques can, however, be difficult to understand. We propose a specification approach to precisely express key concurrency and synchronization properties of such systems. We illustrate the approach with a simple example.