AOP for distributed and concurrent applications

October 30, 2006
Mario Suedholt | Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France

Research in Aspect-Oriented Programming focuses on new modularization mechanisms for so-called crosscutting concerns. Over the last years, a large number of crosscutting concerns has been identified and a fair number of appropriate aspect models have been proposed, chief among them that embodied by AspectJ. The AspectJ model lacks support for the explicit representation of relationships between execution points that are relevant to aspects, hence impeding the concise definition of certain aspects and the application of formal techniques to judge the correctness of AO programs.

In this talk we motivate the use of more expressive aspect languages that enable relationships between execution events to be made explicit. Furthermore, we present two recent approaches with features for explicit distributed AO programming (e.g., remote pointcuts, remote advice execution [bsv+06]) and concurrent aspects (that, e.g., allow synchronization to be expressed in terms of the aspect structure [dlns06]). Finally, we briefly discuss applications of these concepts to web services [bsvv06] and a toll system from Siemens AG, Germany.

[bsv+06] Benavides Navarro, Luis Daniel, Mario Suedholt, Wim Vanderperren, De Fraine, Bruno and Davy Suvee: Explicitly distributed AOP using AWED. Proc. of the 5th Int. ACM Conf. on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD’06).

[bsvv06] Benavides Navarro, Luis Daniel, Mario Suedholt, Wim Vanderperren and Bart Verheecke: Modularization of distributed web services using AWED. Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA’06}.

[dlns06] Rémi Douence, Didier Le Botlan, Jacques Noye and Mario Suedholt: Concurrent Aspects. Proc. of the 5th Int. Conf. on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE’06).

Speaker Details

Dr. Mario Suedholt (www.sudholt.eu) holds a PhD from Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany. He currently is an associated professor in computer science at Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France, and conducts research as part of OBASCO group, an EMN-INRIA joint research project. He has mainly worked on formal foundations for AOP, expressive aspect languages, and their applications. Currently, his work is centered on aspect languages with explicit means for distributed and concurrent programming. He has served several times on the program committee of the main conference on AOSD, co-edited several journal issues on AOSD, and serves on the steering committee of the International Symposium on Software Composition. He also coordinates the activities of the INRIA groups within the European Network of Excellence in AOSD.