Hierarchical concern-based pointcuts

  • Authors:

  • Takeshi Kojima;Tomoyuki Aotani

  • Affiliations:

  • Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi City, Ishikawa Pref., Japan;Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi City, Ishikawa Pref., Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th international workshop on Advanced modularization techniques
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

This paper proposes hierarchical concern-based pointcuts to improve modularity of aspect-oriented programs. It is well known that using names (e.g., class, method and field names) to declare pointcuts makes aspects hard to develop, understand and change. The work addresses the problem by using concerns as the interface between aspects and other modules. The point of our observation is that each method implements a concern at some abstraction level and piece of advice implements relations between concerns. We employ hierarchies to deal with the abstraction levels of concerns, and propose hierarchical annotations to declare for each method the implemented hierarchical concern. Hierarchical concern-based pointcuts also gives an easy way to specify a sequence of join points that call methods with the same concerns. This paper sketches the syntax and semantics of hierarchical concern-based pointcuts through a simple figure editor. The detailed discussions are left for the future work.