Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

JooFlux: Hijacking Java 7 InvokeDynamic To Support Live Code Modifications

Changing functional and non-functional software implementation at runtime is useful and even sometimes critical both in development and production environments. JooFlux is a JVM agent that allows both the dynamic replacement of method implementations and the application of aspect advices. It works by doing bytecode transformation to take advantage of the new invokedynamic instruction added in Java SE 7 to help implementing dynamic languages for the JVM. JooFlux can be managed using a JMX agent so as to operate dynamic modifications at runtime, without resorting to a dedicated domain-specific language. We compared JooFlux with existing AOP platforms and dynamic languages. Results demonstrate that JooFlux performances are close to the Java ones --- with most of the time a marginal overhead, and sometimes a gain --- where AOP platforms and dynamic languages present significant overheads. This paves the way for interesting future evolutions and applications of JooFlux

Pluggable AOP: Designing Aspect Mechanisms for Third-party Composition

Studies of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) usually focus on a language in which a specific aspect extension is integrated with a base language. Languages specified in this manner have a fixed, non-extensible AOP functionality. In this paper we consider the more general case of integrating a base language with a set of domain specific third-party aspect extensions for that language. We present a general mixin-based method for implementing aspect extensions in such a way that multiple, independently developed, dynamic aspect extensions can be subject to third-party composition and work collaboratively

A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications