AspectOptima: A Case Study on Aspect Dependencies and Interactions

This paper presents AspectOptima, a language independent, aspect-oriented framework consisting of a set of ten base aspects — each one providing a well-defined reusable functionality — that can be configured to ensure the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) for transactional objects. The overall goal of AspectOptima is to serve as a case study for aspect-oriented software development, in particular for evaluating the expressivity of aspect-oriented programming languages and how they address complex aspect interactions and dependencies. The ten base aspects of AspectOptima are simple, yet have complex dependencies and interactions among each other. To implement different concurrency control and recovery strategies, these aspects can be composed and assembled into different configurations; some aspects conflict with each other, others have to adapt their runtime behavior according to the presence or absence of other aspects. The design of AspectOptima highlights the need for a set of key language features required for implementing reusable aspect-oriented frameworks. To illustrate the usefulness of AspectOptima as a means for evaluating programming language features, an implementation of AspectOptima in AspectJ is presented. The experiment reveals that AspectJ ’s language features do not directly support implementation of reusable aspect-oriented frameworks with complex dependencies and interactions. The encountered AspectJ language limitations are discussed, workaround solutions are shown, potential language improvements are proposed where appropriate, and some preliminary measurements are presented that highlight the performance impact of certain language features.