Aspect-oriented programming: selecting and exposing object paths

  • Authors:

  • Mohammed Al-Mansari;Stefan Hanenberg;Rainer Unland

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • SC'07 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Software composition
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Aspects require access to the join point context in order to select and adapt join points. For this purpose, current aspect-oriented systems offer a large number of pointcut constructs that provide access to join point information that is local to the join point context, like parameters in method call join points. However, these systems are quite miserly with non-local information that cannot directly be derived from the local execution context. Recently, there have been some proposals that offer access to some kind of non-local information. One such proposal is the path expression pointcut that permits to abstract over non-local object information. Path pointcuts expose non-local objects that are specified in corresponding path expression patterns. In this paper, we show recurrent situations where developers need to access the whole object paths, and consequently, they add workarounds other than pointcut constructs to get the required accesses. Then, we present and study an extension to the path expression pointcuts to permit exposing the object paths and show how this extension overcomes the problem.