On Inter-Application Reuse of Exception Handling Aspects

In this paper we describe a study whose goal is to answer the question: “Is exception handling a reusable aspect”? To this end, we have systematically attempted to reuse exception handling AspectJ aspects across seven different real applications, some of them from the same domain, some based on the same development platform. Our preliminary results indicate that, due to a number of reasons, inter-application reuse is very difficult to achieve in practice. It was only possible to reuse handlers for particular cases, mainly empty handlers and trivial logging handlers. No handler with more than one line of code could be reused.