Enhancing Base-code Protection in Aspect-Oriented Programs

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) promises to localize concerns that inherently crosscut the primary structural decomposition of a software system. Localization of concerns is critical to parallel development, maintainability, modular reasoning, and program understanding. However, AOP as it stands today causes problems in exactly these areas, defeating its purpose and impeding its adoption. First, the need to open up systems' modules for aspects' interaction competes with the need to protect those modules against possible fault injection by aspects. Second, since aspects are written in terms of base code interfaces, base system components must be stable before aspect components can be developed. This dependency hinders parallel development. This work proposes a language-based solution that allows base code classes to regulate aspect invasiveness, and provides loose coupling of aspects and base code.