Modular Aspect-Oriented Design with XPIs

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

Abstract

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 with which code can be developed and changed.

ACM Reference

Sullivan, K.J. et al. 2009. Modular Aspect-Oriented Design with XPIs. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). (2009).

BibTeX Reference

@article{sullivan2009modular,
  author = {Kevin J. Sullivan and William G. Griswold and Hridesh Rajan and Yuanyuan Song and Yuanfang Cai and Macneil Shonle and Nishit Tewari},
  title = {Modular Aspect-Oriented Design with XPIs},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  year = {2009},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  abstract = {
    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 with which code can be developed and changed.
  }
}