On the Role of Method Families for Aspect-Oriented Programming

In this paper we propose method families, i.e. equivalence classes of methods, together with operations to modify them as an important concept for the reusable definition of aspects. Usually different methods show the same behaviour seen under the perspective of an aspect. Hence it seems to be very natural to put additional structure on this interface between the basic functionality and the aspect. Organising methods in families allows to factor out common behaviours increasing the reuse of aspect code within an aspect. Moreover the possibility of dynamically deriving method families from existing method families using operations also improves the reusability of the whole aspect.