Nu: Towards an Aspect-Oriented Invocation Mechanism

The contribution of this work is the design, implementation and evaluation of a new aspect-oriented invocation mechanism for preserving design modularity in object code. We call our mechanism Bind. We make three basic claims. First, it is feasible to realize a programming model that supports Bind to preserve design modularity in object code. Second, the new invocation mechanism further improves the conceptual integrity of the aspect-oriented programming models by allowing advising and runtime properties of aspect-like constructs to be modeled as simple combinations of invocation primitives as opposed to new language constructs. Third, it brings new possibility for structuring aspect-oriented systems, removing the commitment to a single aspect-language model, and expanding the program design space to include arbitrary combinations of language models and advising structures. To support these claims, we present the design and implementation of Nu, a programming model based on the .NET Framework that supports Bind as an invocation mechanism. We show that Nu supports aspect-oriented program designs where multiple aspect-language models can be emulated using Bind, and used in arbitrary combinations without compromising the design modularity in the object code.