A study on exception detection and handling using aspect-oriented programming

  • Authors:

  • Martin Lippert;Cristina Videira Lopes

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, SE Group University of Hamburg Vogt-Kölln-Str. 30 22527 Hamburg, Germany;Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is intended to ease situations that involve many kinds of code tangling. This paper reports on a study to investigate AOP's ability to ease tangling related to exception detection and handling. We took an existing framework written in Java™, the JWAM framework, and partially reengineered its exception detection and handling aspects using AspectJ™, an aspect-oriented programming extension to Java.We found that AspectJ supported implementations that drastically reduced the portion of the code related to exception detection and handling. In one scenario, we were able to reduce that code by a factor of 4. We also found that, with respect to the original implementation in plain Java, AspectJ provided better support for different configurations of exceptional behaviors, more tolerance for changes in the specifications of exceptional behaviors, better support for incremental development, better reuse, automatic enforcement of contracts in applications that use the framework, and cleaner program texts. We also found some weaknesses of AspectJ that should be addressed in the future.