Relationship aspects

  • Authors:

  • David J. Pearce;James Noble

  • Affiliations:

  • Victoria University of Wellington, NZ;Victoria University of Wellington, NZ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

The relationships between objects in object-oriented programs are as important as the objects themselves. Unfortunately, most object-oriented programming languages provide little support for such relationships, leaving the task of implementing them entirely to the programmer. Relationships are typically hard-coded into the participating classes, resulting in tangled code that unnecessarily couples these classes together. The classes become harder to understand and cannot be reused independently. Aspect-oriented programs can model relationships explicitly, treating them as separate concerns that cross-cut their participants. We show how relationships can be implemented as a library of aspects in Aspect/J. Aspects keep relationships independent of their participants, making the resulting programs easier to read, write and reuse, and as efficient as hand-written code.