Orthogonal persistence and AOP: a balancing act

  • Authors:

  • Mohammed Al-Mansari;Stefan Hanenberg;Rainer Unland

  • Affiliations:

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

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th workshop on Aspects, components, and patterns for infrastructure software
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In order to increase the productivity of the application developers, it is desirable to remove the persistence concern from their responsibility. For this purpose, the orthogonal persistence concept was introduced along with three principles: type orthogonality, persistence independence and transitivity. From an aspect-oriented point of view these principles have to be considered from the perspective of obliviousness. There is already a number of aspect-oriented persistence solutions where it is not that clear whether they handle the previous principles really in an oblivious way. In this paper, we discuss to what extent these aspect-oriented solutions really make the developer oblivious of the persistence concern. As a conclusion, we find that these systems in general defeat the orthogonal persistence and consequently, using them distracts developers from concentrating on the application logic. In order to increase the obliviousness of the persistence concern we propose a combination of two new concepts: persisting containers and path expression pointcuts.