DSL Weaving for Distributed Information Flow Systems

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a promising field for reducing application complexity. However, it has proven difficult to implement weavers for general purpose languages. Nevertheless, we felt some functionality for our information flow abstraction, Infopipes, might be best captured in aspects. In this paper, we describe a weaver built for domain specific languages (DSLs) related to Infopipes around an off-the-shelf XSLT processor. Aspects are written in XSLT, XML annotations are added to existing DSL generation templates, and XML directives are added to our Infopipes specification. Finally, we successfully demonstrate a generated+woven application that adds the quality of service (QoS) dimension of CPU usage awareness to an image streaming application.