From (meta) objects to aspects: a java and AspectJ point of view

  • Authors:

  • Pierre Cointe;Hervé Albin-Amiot;Simon Denier

  • Affiliations:

  • OBASCO group, EMN-INRIA, LINA (CNRS FRE 2729), École des Mines de Nantes, Nantes, France;OBASCO group, EMN-INRIA, LINA (CNRS FRE 2729), École des Mines de Nantes, Nantes, France;OBASCO group, EMN-INRIA, LINA (CNRS FRE 2729), École des Mines de Nantes, Nantes, France

  • Venue:
  • FMCO'04 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Formal Methods for Components and Objects
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

eWe point some major contributions of the object-oriented approach in the field of separation of concerns and more particularly design-patterns and metaobject protocols. We discuss some limitations of objects focusing on program reusability and scalability. We sketch some intuitions behind the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) approach as a new attempt to deal with separation of concerns by managing scattered and tangled code. In fact AOP provides techniques to represent crosscutting program units such as display, persistency and transport services. Then AOP allows to weave these units with legacy application components to incrementally adapt them. We present a guided tour of AspectJ illustrating by examples the new concepts of pointcuts, advices and inter-type declarations. This tour is the opportunity to discuss how the AspectJ model answers some of the issues raised by post-object oriented programming but also to enforce the relationship between reflective and aspect-oriented languages.