Weave Now or Weave Later: A Test Driven Development Perspective on Aspect-oriented Deployment Models

By: Rakesh Bangalore Shivarudra Setty, Robert Dyer, and Hridesh Rajan

Abstract

The choice to use static or load-time weaving techniques in the development cycle of large AspectJ programs is not clear. It is a common practice to iteratively remove errors from programs by making small changes, recompiling, and testing the change. Previous research has shown that incremental compilation of aspect-oriented programs using static weavers can take longer compared to object-oriented programs, which in turn increases the time spent in each iteration. It has been suggested that utilizing load-time weavers can potentially alleviate the problem. However, there is a trade-off involved which is the increased execution time due to the overhead involved in weaving while loading classes. In this paper, we report on a case study in which we examine the parameters that differentiate the two techniques during the edit-compile-test cycle and determine which technique is more favorable as these parameters vary. Our results show that the parameters that differentiate the techniques are the number of classes loaded, the size of the project and the number of join points executed including repetitions. We also find that load-time weaving does solve the problem of incremental compilation in aspect-oriented programming to some extent under some favorable values of the parameters mentioned. We find that the performance of static weaving with respect to load-time weaving is directly proportional to the number of classes loaded during test, and the performance of load-time weaving with respect to static weaving is directly proportional to the size of the project and the number of join points executed. Our results also show that the percentage of join points affected by aspects do not differentiate between the two techniques.

ACM Reference

Setty, R.B.S. et al. 2008. Weave Now or Weave Later: A Test Driven Development Perspective on Aspect-oriented Deployment Models. Technical Report #08-02. Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science.

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{setty2008weave,
  title = {Weave Now or Weave Later: A Test Driven Development Perspective on Aspect-oriented Deployment Models},
  author = {Setty, Rakesh Bangalore Shivarudra and Dyer, Robert and Rajan, Hridesh},
  year = {2008},
  month = {February},
  institution = {Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science},
  number = {08-02},
  abstract = {
    The choice to use static or load-time weaving techniques in the development
    cycle of large AspectJ programs is not clear. It is a common practice to
    iteratively remove errors from programs by making small changes, recompiling,
    and testing the change. Previous research has shown that incremental
    compilation of aspect-oriented programs using static weavers can take longer
    compared to object-oriented programs, which in turn increases the time spent
    in each iteration. It has been suggested that utilizing load-time weavers can
    potentially alleviate the problem. However, there is a trade-off involved
    which is the increased execution time due to the overhead involved in weaving
    while loading classes. In this paper, we report on a case study in which we
    examine the parameters that differentiate the two techniques during the
    edit-compile-test cycle and determine which technique is more favorable as
    these parameters vary. Our results show that the parameters that differentiate
    the techniques are the number of classes loaded, the size of the project and
    the number of join points executed including repetitions. We also find that
    load-time weaving does solve the problem of incremental compilation in
    aspect-oriented programming to some extent under some favorable values of the
    parameters mentioned. We find that the performance of static weaving with
    respect to load-time weaving is directly proportional to the number of classes
    loaded during test, and the performance of load-time weaving with respect to
    static weaving is directly proportional to the size of the project and the
    number of join points executed. Our results also show that the percentage of
    join points affected by aspects do not differentiate between the two
    techniques.
  }
}