EJFlow: taming exceptional control flows in aspect-oriented programming

  • Authors:

  • Nelio Cacho;Fernando Castor Filho;Alessandro Garcia;Eduardo Figueiredo

  • Affiliations:

  • Lancaster University, United Kingdom;University of Pernambuco, Brazil;Lancaster University, United Kingdom;Lancaster University, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Many of the problems that stem from the use of exception handling are caused by the local way in which exceptions are handled. It demands that developers understand the source of an exception, the place where it is handled, and everything in between. As a consequence, exceptions easily get "out of control" and, as system development progresses, exceptional control flows become less well-understood, with potentially negative consequences for the program maintainability and reliability. This paper presents an innovative aspect-oriented model for exception handling implementation. In contrast to other exception handling mechanisms, our model provides abstractions to explicitly describe global views of exceptional control flows. As a result, this new model makes it possible to understand exception flows from an end-to-end perspective by looking at a single part of the program. Also, it leverages existing pointcut languages to make the association of handlers with normal code more flexible. The implementation of our proposed model, called EJFlow, extends the AspectJ programming language with the aim of promoting enhanced robustness and program modularization. We evaluate qualitatively and quantitatively the proposed exception handling model through a case study targeting a real mobile application.