The Aspect Markup Language and its Support of Aspect Plugins

We describe the Aspect Markup Language (AML), an XML-based AOP language for programming aspects. AML separates the binding instructions, written in XML, from the executable aspect code, written in a regular programming language. This separation by itself has some advantages, namely for testing. But the main goal of AML is to provide a highly extensible AOP platform, with which programmers can easily define their own constructs using well-known plugin techniques. This novel feature enables the development of AOP toolkits that target domain-specific crosscutting concerns. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we have implemented AML for Java, along with a corresponding aspect weaver, jamlc. Jamlc weaves aspects written in AML and Java components into target bytecode. We present examples and show how to write aspect plugins. The Aspect Markup Language and its Support of Aspect Plugins Cristina Videira Lopes and Trung Chi Ngo Institute for Software Research and Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences Department of Informatics University of California, Irvine {lopes, trungcn} @ ics.uci.edu ISR Technical Report UCI-ISR-04-8 ABSTRACT We describe the Aspect Markup Language (AML), an XMLbased AOP language for programming aspects. AML separates the binding instructions, written in XML, from the executable aspect code, written in a regular programming language. This separation by itself has some advantages, namely for testing. But the main goal of AML is to provide a highly extensible AOP platform, with which programmers can easily define their own constructs using well-known plugin techniques. This novel feature enables the development of AOP toolkits that target domainspecific crosscutting concerns.We describe the Aspect Markup Language (AML), an XMLbased AOP language for programming aspects. AML separates the binding instructions, written in XML, from the executable aspect code, written in a regular programming language. This separation by itself has some advantages, namely for testing. But the main goal of AML is to provide a highly extensible AOP platform, with which programmers can easily define their own constructs using well-known plugin techniques. This novel feature enables the development of AOP toolkits that target domainspecific crosscutting concerns. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we have implemented AML for Java, along with a corresponding aspect weaver, jamlc. Jamlc weaves aspects written in AML and Java components into target bytecode. We present examples and show how to write aspect plugins.