Information Hiding Interfaces for Aspect-Oriented Design

By: Kevin Sullivan, William G. Griswold, Yuanyuan Song, Yuanfang Cai, Macneil Shonle, Nishit Tewari, and Hridesh Rajan

Abstract

The growing popularity of aspect-oriented languages, such as AspectJ, and of corresponding design approaches, makes it important to learn how best to modularize programs in which aspect-oriented composition mechanisms are used. We contribute an approach to information hiding modularity in programs that use quantified advising as a module composition mechanism. Our approach rests on a new kind of interface: one that abstracts a crosscutting behavior, decouples the design of code that advises such a behavior from the design of the code to be advised, and that can stipulate behavioral contracts. Our interfaces establish design rules that govern how specific points in program execution are exposed through a given join point model and how conforming code on either side should behave. In a case study of the HyperCast overlay network middleware system, including a real options analysis, we compare the widely cited oblivious design approach with our own, showing significant weaknesses in the former and benefits in the latter.

ACM Reference

Sullivan, K. et al. 2005. Information hiding interfaces for aspect-oriented design. ESEC/FSE-13: Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering (New York, NY, USA, 2005), 166–175.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{sullivan2005information,
  author = {Kevin Sullivan and William G. Griswold and Yuanyuan Song and
            Yuanfang Cai and Macneil Shonle and Nishit Tewari and
            Hridesh Rajan},
  title = {Information hiding interfaces for aspect-oriented design},
  booktitle = {ESEC/FSE-13: Proceedings of the 10th European software
    engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT
    international symposium on Foundations of software engineering},
  year = {2005},
  pages = {166--175},
  location = {Lisbon, Portugal},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  entrysubtype = {conference},
  abstract = {
    The growing popularity of aspect-oriented languages, such as AspectJ, and of
    corresponding design approaches, makes it important to learn how best to
    modularize programs in which aspect-oriented composition mechanisms are used.
    We contribute an approach to information hiding modularity in programs that
    use quantified advising as a module composition mechanism. Our approach rests
    on a new kind of interface: one that abstracts a crosscutting behavior,
    decouples the design of code that advises such a behavior from the design of
    the code to be advised, and that can stipulate behavioral contracts. Our
    interfaces establish design rules that govern how specific points in program
    execution are exposed through a given join point model and how conforming code
    on either side should behave. In a case study of the HyperCast overlay network
    middleware system, including a real options analysis, we compare the widely
    cited oblivious design approach with our own, showing significant weaknesses
    in the former and benefits in the latter.
  }
}