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

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

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

The evolution of vibrational excitations in glassy systems

The equations of the mode-coupling theory (MCT) for ideal liquid-glass transitions are used for a discussion of the evolution of the density-fluctuation spectra of glass-forming systems for frequencies within the dynamical window between the band of high-frequency motion and the band of low-frequency-structural-relaxation processes. It is shown that the strong interaction between density fluctuations with microscopic wave length and the arrested glass structure causes an anomalous-oscillation peak, which exhibits the properties of the so-called boson peak. It produces an elastic modulus which governs the hybridization of density fluctuations of mesoscopic wave length with the boson-peak oscillations. This leads to the existence of high-frequency sound with properties as found by X-ray-scattering spectroscopy of glasses and glassy liquids. The results of the theory are demonstrated for a model of the hard-sphere system. It is also derived that certain schematic MCT models, whose spectra for the stiff-glass states can be expressed by elementary formulas, provide reasonable approximations for the solutions of the general MCT equations.Comment: 50 pages, 17 postscript files including 18 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

An overview of Mirjam and WeaveC

In this chapter, we elaborate on the design of an industrial-strength aspectoriented programming language and weaver for large-scale software development. First, we present an analysis on the requirements of a general purpose aspect-oriented language that can handle crosscutting concerns in ASML software. We also outline a strategy on working with aspects in large-scale software development processes. In our design, we both re-use existing aspect-oriented language abstractions and propose new ones to address the issues that we identified in our analysis. The quality of the code ensured by the realized language and weaver has a positive impact both on maintenance effort and lead-time in the first line software development process. As evidence, we present a short evaluation of the language and weaver as applied today in the software development process of ASML

Integrating the common variability language with multilanguage annotations for web engineering

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches even though the majority of studies encourage the use of composition-based approaches to implement Software Product Lines. Recent work tries to combine both approaches to get the complementary benefits. However, technological companies are reticent to adopt new development paradigms such as feature-oriented programming or aspect-oriented programming. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to apply these programming models to web applications, mainly because of their multilingual nature, since their development involves multiple types of source code (Java, Groovy, JavaScript), templates (HTML, Markdown, XML), style sheet files (CSS and its variants, such as SCSS), and other files (JSON, YML, shell scripts). We propose to use the Common Variability Language as a composition-based approach and integrate annotations to manage fine grained variability of a Software Product Line for web applications. In this paper, we (i) show that existing composition and annotation-based approaches, including some well-known combinations, are not appropriate to model and implement the variability of web applications; and (ii) present a combined approach that effectively integrates annotations into a composition-based approach for web applications. We implement our approach and show its applicability with an industrial real-world system.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Aspect-Oriented Programming

Aspect-oriented programming is a promising idea that can improve the quality of software by reduce the problem of code tangling and improving the separation of concerns. At ECOOP'97, the first AOP workshop brought together a number of researchers interested in aspect-orientation. At ECOOP'98, during the second AOP workshop the participants reported on progress in some research topics and raised more issues that were further discussed. \ud \ud This year, the ideas and concepts of AOP have been spread and adopted more widely, and, accordingly, the workshop received many submissions covering areas from design and application of aspects to design and implementation of aspect languages