Aspect-oriented Programming Languages Research Articles

Design and Implementation of an Aspect-Oriented C Programming Language

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that implements crosscutting concerns in a modular way. People have witnessed the prosperity of AOP languages for Java and C++, such as AspectJ and AspectC++, which has propelled AOP to become an important programming paradigm with many interesting application scenarios, e.g., runtime verification. In contrast, the AOP languages for C are still poor and lack compiler support. In this paper, we design a new general-purpose and expressive aspect-oriented C programming language, namely Aclang, and implement a compiler for it, which brings fully-fledged AOP support into the C domain. We have evaluated the effectiveness and performance of our compiler against two state-of-the-art tools, ACC and AspectC++. In terms of effectiveness, Aclang outperforms ACC and AspectC++. In terms of performance, Aclang outperforms ACC in execution time and outperforms AspectC++ in both execution time and memory consumption.

An Efficient Monte Carlo-Based Probabilistic Time-Dependent Routing Calculation Targeting a Server-Side Car Navigation System

Incorporating speed probability distribution to the computation of the route planning in car navigation systems guarantees more accurate and precise responses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for selecting dynamically the number of samples used for the Monte Carlo simulation to solve the Probabilistic Time-Dependent Routing (PTDR) problem, thus improving the computation efficiency. The proposed method is used to determine in a proactive manner the number of simulations to be done to extract the travel-time estimation for each specific request, while respecting an error threshold as output quality level. The methodology requires a reduced effort on the application development side. We adopted an aspect-oriented programming language (LARA) together with a flexible dynamic autotuning library (mARGOt) respectively to instrument the code and to make decisions on tuning the number of samples to improve the execution efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive approach saves a large fraction of simulations (between 36 and 81 percent) with respect to a static approach, while considering different traffic situations, paths and error requirements. Given the negligible runtime overhead of the proposed approach, the execution-time speedup is between 1.5x and 5.1x. This speedup is reflected at the infrastructure-level in terms of a reduction of 36 percent of the computing resources needed to support the whole navigation pipeline.

AES High-Level SystemC Modeling using Aspect Oriented Programming Approach

The increasing complexity of the cryptographic modeling and security simulation of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) necessitate fast modeling and simulation security environment. The SystemC language is used in Electronic System Level (ESL) that allows cryptographic models to achieve high security and modeling simulation speed. Yet, the use of SystemC in the security simulation requires modifications of the original code which increases the modeling complexity. The Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) can be used in the cryptographic modeling and security simulations without any code modification. In this paper, a new AES SystemC model using the AOP technique is presented. A functional verification environment is proposed to test the functionality of the AES SystemC AOP model, the impact of AOP on simulation time, and the size of the executable files. The design of the AES model is developed with the weaving of all modules by AspectC++ which is an AOP language. The Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed AES model and the uses of the AOP technique do not have a significant impact on simulation time or on the size of the executable file.

Extension and adaptation of an aspect oriented programming language for real-time systems

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) supports the separation of concerns cutting across the implementation of a software application to avoid scattering and tangling. We focus on the integration of this paradigm in the development of real-time systems. AOP is based on the weaving process to automatically integrate separately created segments of code, into the application. In the context of real-time systems, this can compromise determinism by including constructs that may violate real-time constraints. In this paper, we both study and test the AspectAda language, an existing aspect extension for Ada, in order to adapt its implementation to respect real-time constraints. We study this language's grammar, runtime and especially weaving operations. Then, we extract its limits and provide solutions to adapt it to support real-time constraints. Finally, we propose a new architecture of the compiler/weaver to overcome the problems of the existing one and we detail its different parts.

Extension and adaptation of an aspect oriented programming language for real-time systems

Aspect oriented programming (AOP) supports the separation of concerns cutting across the implementation of a software application to avoid scattering and tangling. We focus on the integration of this paradigm in the development of real-time systems. AOP is based on the weaving process to automatically integrate separately created segments of code, into the application. In the context of real-time systems, this can compromise determinism by including constructs that may violate real-time constraints. In this paper, we both study and test the AspectAda language, an existing aspect extension for Ada, in order to adapt its implementation to respect real-time constraints. We study this language's grammar, runtime and especially weaving operations. Then, we extract its limits and provide solutions to adapt it to support real-time constraints. Finally, we propose a new architecture of the compiler/weaver to overcome the problems of the existing one and we detail its different parts.

Aspect composition for multiple target languages using LARA

Usually, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) languages are an extension of a specific target programming language (e.g., AspectJ for Java and AspectC++ for C++). Although providing AOP support with target language extensions may ease the adoption of an approach, it may impose constraints related with constructs and semantics. Furthermore, by tightly coupling the AOP language to the target language the reuse potential of many aspects, especially the ones regarding non-functional requirements, is lost. LARA is a domain-specific language inspired by AOP concepts, having the specification of source-to-source transformations as one of its main goals. LARA has been designed to be, as much as possible, independent of the target language and to provide constructs and semantics that ease the definition of concerns, especially related to non-functional requirements. In this paper, we propose techniques to overcome some of the challenges presented by a multilanguage approach to AOP of cross-cutting concerns focused on non-functional requirements and applied through the use of a weaving process. The techniques mainly focus on providing well-defined library interfaces that can have concrete implementations for each supported target language. The developer uses an agnostic interface and the weaver provides a specific implementation for the target language. We evaluate our approach using 8 concerns with varying levels of language agnosticism that support 4 target languages (C, C++, Java and MATLAB) and show that the proposed techniques contribute to more concise LARA aspects, high reuse of aspects, and to significant effort reductions when developing weavers for new imperative, object-oriented programming languages.

An empirical study on the impact of AspectJ on software evolvability

Since its inception in 1996, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been believed to reduce the effort required to maintain software systems by replacing cross-cutting code with aspects. However, little convincing empirical evidence exists to support this claim, while several studies suggest that AOP brings new obstacles to maintainability. This paper discusses two controlled experiments conducted to evaluate the impact of AspectJ (the most mature and popular aspect-oriented programming language) versus Java on software evolvability. We consider evolvability as the ease with which a software system can be updated to fulfill new requirements. Since a minor language was compared to the mainstream, the experiments were designed so as to anticipate that the participants were much more experienced in one of the treatments. The first experiment was performed on 35 student subjects who were asked to comprehend either Java or AspectJ implementation of the same system, and perform the corresponding comprehension tasks. Participants of both groups achieved a high rate of correct answers without a statistically significant difference between the groups. Nevertheless, the Java group significantly outperformed the AspectJ group with respect to the average completion time. In the second experiment, 24 student subjects were asked to implement (in a non-invasive way) two extension scenarios to the system that they had already known. Each subject evolved either the Java version using Java or the AspectJ version using AspectJ. We found out that a typical AspectJ programmer needs significantly fewer atomic changes to implement the change scenarios than a typical Java programmer, but we did not observe a significant difference in completion time. The overall result indicates that AspectJ has a different effect on two sub-characteristics of the evolvability: understandability and changeability. While AspectJ decreases the former, it improves one aspect of the latter.

A MATLAB subset to C compiler targeting embedded systems

Summary This paper describes MATISSE, a compiler able to translate a MATLAB subset to C targeting embedded systems. MATISSE uses LARA, an aspect-oriented programming language, to specify additional information and transformations to the input MATLAB code, for example, insertion of code for initialization of variables, and specification of types and shapes of variables. The compiler is being developed bearing in mind flexibility, multitarget and multitoolchain support, allowing for the generation of several implementations in C from the same reference code in MATLAB. In this paper, we also present a number of techniques being employed in MATLAB to C compilation, such as element-wise mapping operations, matrix views, weak types, and intrinsics. We validate these techniques using MATISSE and a set of representative benchmarks. More specifically, we evaluate the compiler with a set of 31 benchmarks using an embedded system board and a desktop computer. The results show speedups up to 1.8× by employing information provided by LARA aspects, when compared with C code generated without additional user information. When compared with the execution time of the original code running on MATLAB, the execution time of the generated C code achieved a geometric mean speedup of 13×.

AspectJ code analysis and verification with GASR

Aspect-oriented programming languages extend existing languages with new features for supporting modularization of crosscutting concerns. These features however make existing source code analysis tools unable to reason over this code. Consequently, all code analysis efforts of aspect-oriented code that we are aware of have either built limited analysis tools or were performed manually. Given the significant complexity of building them or manual analysis, a lot of duplication of effort could have been avoided by using a general-purpose tool. To address this, in this paper we present Gasr: a source code analysis tool that reasons over AspectJ source code, which may contain metadata in the form of annotations. GASR provides multiple kinds of analyses that are general enough such that they are reusable, tailorable and can reason over annotations. We demonstrate the use of GASR in two ways: we first automate the recognition of previously identified aspectual source code assumptions. Second, we turn implicit assumptions into explicit assumptions through annotations and automate their verification. In both uses GASR performs detection and verification of aspect assumptions on two well-known case studies that were manually investigated in earlier work. GASR finds already known aspect assumptions and adds instances that had been previously overlooked.

Introduction to dynamic program analysis with DiSL

Dynamic program analysis (DPA) tools assist in many software engineering and development tasks, such as profiling, program comprehension, and performance model construction and calibration. On the Java platform, many DPA tools are implemented either using aspect-oriented programming (AOP), or rely on bytecode instrumentation to modify the base program code. The pointcut/advice model found in AOP enables rapid tool development, but does not allow expressing certain instrumentations due to limitations of mainstream AOP languages—developers thus use bytecode manipulation to gain more expressiveness and performance. However, while the existing bytecode manipulation libraries handle some low-level details, they still make tool development tedious and error-prone. Targeting this issue, we provide the first complete presentation of DiSL, an open-source instrumentation framework that reconciles the conciseness of the AOP pointcut/advice model and the expressiveness and performance achievable with bytecode manipulation libraries. Specifically, we extend our previous work to provide an overview of the DiSL architecture, advanced features, and the programming model. We also include case studies illustrating successful deployment of DiSL-based DPA tools.

Execution levels for aspect-oriented programming: Design, semantics, implementations and applications

In aspect-oriented programming (AOP) languages, advice evaluation is usually considered as part of the base program evaluation. This is also the case for certain pointcuts, such as if pointcuts in AspectJ, or simply all pointcuts in higher-order aspect languages like AspectScheme. While viewing aspects as part of base level computation clearly distinguishes AOP from reflection, it also comes at a price: because aspects observe base level computation, evaluating pointcuts and advice at the base level can trigger infinite regression. To avoid these pitfalls, aspect languages propose ad-hoc mechanisms, which increase the complexity for programmers while being insufficient in many cases. After shedding light on the many facets of the issue, this paper proposes to clarify the situation by introducing levels of execution in the programming language, thereby allowing aspects to observe and run at specific, possibly different, levels. We adopt a defensive default that avoids infinite regression, and gives advanced programmers the means to override this default using level-shifting operators. We then study execution levels both in practice and in theory. First, we study the relevance of the issues addressed by execution levels in existing aspect-oriented programs. We then formalize the semantics of execution levels and prove that the default semantics is indeed free of a certain form of infinite regression, which we call aspect loops. Finally, we report on existing implementations of execution levels for aspect-oriented extensions of Scheme, JavaScript and Java, discussing their implementation techniques and current applications.

Analysis of Mutation Testing Tools in Aspect Oriented Software Engineering

Mutation testing measures the adequacy of the test suite by seeding artificial defects i.e. mutants in the program. If the mutant is not detected by the test suite, is means that the test suite is not adequate. And new test suites are added until all the mutants have been detected. AspectJ is an aspect-oriented programming language that provides the concept of pointcut and advice. In this paper we proposed different mutation testing tools, their need and manner to implement and also at last we had developed a tabular comparison of different mutation testing tools like Ajmutator, Advice Tracer, MuAspectJ and Proteum/AJ. The uses of such tools in the a testing process enhances the feasibility of using it in real software development process and helped us to reason about the current functionalities and to identify future needs. The result includes the comparison of different testing tools and a number of parameters to judge their performance. General Terms Mutation Testing

Aspect-Oriented Software Quality Model: The AOSQ Model

Nowadays, software development has become more complex and dynamic; they are expected more flexible, scalable and reusable. Under the umbrella of aspect, Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is relatively a modern programming paradigm to improve modularity in software development. Using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) language to implements crosscutting concerns through the introduction of a new construct Aspect like Class is defined as a modular unit of crosscutting behavior that affect multiple classes into reusable modules. Several quality models to measure the quality of software are available in literature. However, keep on developing software, and acceptance of new environment (i.e. AOP) under conditions that give rise to an issue of evolvability. After the evolution of system, we have to find out how the new system needs to be extensible? What is the configurable status? Is designed pattern stable for new environment and technology? How the new system is sustainable? The objective of this paper is to propose a new quality model for AOSD to integrating some new quality attributes in AOSQUAMO Model based which is based on ISO/IEC 9126 Quality Model, is called Aspect- Oriented Quality (AOSQ) Model. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to evaluate an improved hierarchical quality model for AOSD.

Accessing and Evaluating AspectJ based Mutation Testing Tools

ABSTRACT Software testing plays a crucial role in software development life cycle. Without testing, quality of software product is questionable. Mutation testing, widely accepted fault based testing technique. Aspect Oriented Programming is a new methodology that introduces the concept of modularization. AspectJ is an aspect oriented programming language that provides the concept of pointcut and advice. With new features, AOP introduces new faults that can be easily handled by mutation testing. In this paper, we evaluate the available AspectJ based mutation testing tools and identify the basic requirements that must be satisfied by any developed tool. research plans. Keyword Mutation testing, Automated Mutation Testing tool, Fault based mutation testing tool, Mutation testing tool for AspectJ, AOP based Mutation testing tool. 1. INTRODUCTION Software testing is the activity of establishing confidence that a system does what it is supposed to do and does not what it is not supposed to do. Since it is impossible to build an error-free system, testing a system is an essential process in software development. Thus, a great deal of research on software testing has been carried out for many years [2,4]. Traditionally, software systems have been developed in a procedural environment and then in object oriented environment. Recently, a new approach to system decomposition has become popular called aspect-oriented programming (AOP), which makes it possible to clearly express programs involving such aspects, including appropriate isolation, composition and reuse of the aspect code [5,12]. The advent of object-oriented methodologies pulled the state of the system into individual objects, where it could be made private and controlled through access methods and logic [31]. This leads to the current situation: Developers are still having difficulty fully expressing a problem into a completely modular and encapsulated model. Although breaking a problem into objects makes sense, some pieces of functionality must be made available across objects. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is one of the most promising solutions to the problem of creating clean, well-encapsulated objects without extraneous functionality. The purpose of this work is to attempt to evaluate advantages and limitations of the current AspectJ based mutation testing tools. In this paper, we will find out the basic requirements to develop a mutation testing tool for AspectJ based systems. In this paper, we will compare the available AspectJ based mutation testing tools on the basis of requirements and identify the limitations. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 describes the mutation testing process. Section 3 describes the current aspect oriented mutation testing tools. Section 4 describes the basic requirements to develop a mutation testing tool. Finally, section 5 makes a conclusion on the requirements on the basis of current aspect oriented mutation testing tools and proposes future

Towards aspect-oriented functional--structural plant modelling.

Functional-structural plant models (FSPMs) are used to integrate knowledge and test hypotheses of plant behaviour, and to aid in the development of decision support systems. A significant amount of effort is being put into providing a sound methodology for building them. Standard techniques, such as procedural or object-oriented programming, are not suited for clearly separating aspects of plant function that criss-cross between different components of plant structure, which makes it difficult to reuse and share their implementations. The aim of this paper is to present an aspect-oriented programming approach that helps to overcome this difficulty. The L-system-based plant modelling language L+C was used to develop an aspect-oriented approach to plant modelling based on multi-modules. Each element of the plant structure was represented by a sequence of L-system modules (rather than a single module), with each module representing an aspect of the element's function. Separate sets of productions were used for modelling each aspect, with context-sensitive rules facilitated by local lists of modules to consider/ignore. Aspect weaving or communication between aspects was made possible through the use of pseudo-L-systems, where the strict-predecessor of a production rule was specified as a multi-module. The new approach was used to integrate previously modelled aspects of carbon dynamics, apical dominance and biomechanics with a model of a developing kiwifruit shoot. These aspects were specified independently and their implementation was based on source code provided by the original authors without major changes. This new aspect-oriented approach to plant modelling is well suited for studying complex phenomena in plant science, because it can be used to integrate separate models of individual aspects of plant development and function, both previously constructed and new, into clearly organized, comprehensive FSPMs. In a future work, this approach could be further extended into an aspect-oriented programming language for FSPMs.

Flexible and efficient profiling with aspect‐oriented programming

AbstractMany profilers for virtual execution environments, such as the Java virtual machine (JVM), are implemented with low‐level bytecode instrumentation techniques, which is tedious, error‐prone, and complicates maintenance and extension of the tools. In order to reduce the development time and cost, we promote building profilers for the JVM using high‐level aspect‐oriented programming (AOP). We show that the use of aspects yields concise profilers that are easy to develop, extend, and maintain, because low‐level instrumentation details are hidden from the tool developer. In order to build efficient profilers, we introduce inter‐advice communication, an extension to common AOP languages that enables efficient data passing between advices that are woven into the same method using local variables. We illustrate our approach with two case studies. First, we show that an existing, instrumentation‐based tool for listener latency profiling can be easily recast as an aspect. Second, we present an aspect for comprehensive calling context profiling. In order to reduce profiling overhead, our aspect parallelizes application execution and profile creation, resulting in a speedup of 110% on a machine with more than two cores, compared with a primitive, non‐parallel approach. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Aspect Oriented Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering techniques that explicitly recognize the importance of clearly identifying and treating crosscutting concerns are called Aspect-oriented Requirements Engineering Approaches (AORE approaches). The emergence of aspect-oriented programming languages has raised the explicit need to identify crosscutting concerns already during the analysis phase. Besides this observation, the modular representation of crosscutting requirements is a first step to ensure traceability of crosscutting concerns through all other artifacts of the software lifecycle (architecture, design and implementation).Aspect-oriented requirements engineering approaches improve existing requirements engineering approaches through an explicit representation (and modularization) of concerns that were otherwise spread throughout other requirements artifacts (such as use cases, goal models, viewpoints, etc.).AORE approaches adopt the principle of separation of concerns at the analysis phase (the early separation of concerns). In other words, AORE approaches provide a representation of crosscutting concerns in requirements artifacts.

Modular aspect-oriented design with XPIs

The emergence of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) languages has provided software designers with new mechanisms and strategies for decomposing programs into modules and composing modules into systems. What we do not yet fully understand is how best to use such mechanisms consistent with common modularization objectives such as the comprehensibility of programming code, its parallel development, dependability, and ease of change. The main contribution of this work is a new form of information-hiding interface for AOP that we call the crosscut programming interface, or XPI. XPIs abstract crosscutting behaviors and make these abstractions explicit. XPIs can be used, albeit with limited enforcement of interface rules, with existing AOP languages, such as AspectJ. To evaluate our notion of XPIs, we have applied our XPI-based design methodology to a medium-sized network overlay application called Hypercast. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of existing AO design methods and XPI-based design method shows that our approach produces improvements in program comprehensibility, in opportunities for parallel development, and in the ease when code can be developed and changed.

ADVANCED AND RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF DYNAMIC ANALYSIS TOOLS FOR JAVA

Low-level bytecode instrumentation techniques are widely used in many software-engineering tools for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), that perform some form of dynamic program analysis, such as profilers or debuggers. While program manipulation at the bytecode level is very flexible, because the possible bytecode transformations are not restricted, tool development based on this technique is tedious and error-prone. As a promising alternative, the specification of bytecode instrumentation at a higher level using aspect-oriented programming (AOP) can reduce tool development time and cost. Unfortunately, prevailing AOP frameworks lack some features that are essential for certain dynamic analyses. In this article, we focus on three common shortcomings in AOP frameworks with respect to the development of aspect-based tools - (1) the lack of mechanisms for passing data between woven advices in local variables, (2) the support for user-defined static analyses at weaving time, and (3) the absence of pointcuts at the level of individual basic blocks of code. We propose @J, an annotation-based AOP language and weaver that integrates support for these three features. The benefits of the proposed features are illustrated with concrete examples.

Aspect-Oriented Race Detection in Java

In the past, researchers have developed specialized programs to aid programmers in detecting concurrent programming errors such as deadlocks, livelocks, starvation, and data races. In this work, we propose a language extension to the aspect-oriented programming language AspectJ, in the form of three new pointcuts, lock(), unlock(), and maybeShared(). These pointcuts allow programmers to monitor program events where locks are granted or handed back, and where values are accessed that may be shared among multiple Java threads. We decide thread locality using a static thread-local-objects analysis developed by others. Using the three new primitive pointcuts, researchers can directly implement efficient monitoring algorithms to detect concurrent-programming errors online. As an example, we describe a new algorithm which we call RACER, an adaption of the well-known ERASER algorithm to the memory model of Java. We implemented the new pointcuts as an extension to the AspectBench Compiler, implemented the RACER algorithm using this language extension, and then applied the algorithm to the NASA K9 Rover Executive and two smaller programs. Our experiments demonstrate that our implementation is effective in finding subtle data races. In the Rover Executive, RACER finds 12 data races, with no false warnings. Only one of these races was previously known.