Supporting dynamic aspect-oriented features

By: Robert Dyer

Abstract

Aspect-oriented programming techniques extend object-oriented programming with new methods to modularize concerns that otherwise would be non-modular. For example, logging concerns are typically scattered across a system but using aspect-oriented techniques they can be localized into a single high-level module. These techniques typically take modular high-level code and statically transform it into non-modular intermediate code. The contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a flexible and dynamic intermediate-language (IL) model. The main motivation for the design of this IL model is to support a variety of dynamic aspect-oriented language constructs that are proposed in recent literature such as CaeserJ’s deploy, history-based pointcuts, and control flow constructs. Our IL model provides a higher level of abstraction compared to traditional object-oriented ILs as a compilation target for such constructs, which makes it easier to provide efficient implementations of these constructs. We demonstrate these benefits by providing an industrial strength implementation for our IL model, by showing translation strategies from dynamic source-level constructs to our improved IL, and by analyzing the performance of the resulting IL code. Our evaluation using the SPEC JVM98 and Java Grande benchmarks shows that the overhead of supporting a dynamic deployment model can be reduced to as little as 1.5%, when compared to the unmodified VM.

ACM Reference

Dyer, R. 2008. Supporting dynamic aspect-oriented features. Iowa State University.

BibTeX Reference

@mastersthesis{dyer2008supporting,
  title = {Supporting dynamic aspect-oriented features},
  author = {Dyer, Robert},
  year = {2008},
  school = {Iowa State University},
  abstract = {
    Aspect-oriented programming techniques extend object-oriented programming with
    new methods to modularize concerns that otherwise would be non-modular. For
    example, logging concerns are typically scattered across a system but using
    aspect-oriented techniques they can be localized into a single high-level
    module. These techniques typically take modular high-level code and statically
    transform it into non-modular intermediate code.

    The contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a flexible and
    dynamic intermediate-language (IL) model. The main motivation for the design of
    this IL model is to support a variety of dynamic aspect-oriented language
    constructs that are proposed in recent literature such as CaeserJ's deploy,
    history-based pointcuts, and control flow constructs. Our IL model provides a
    higher level of abstraction compared to traditional object-oriented ILs as a
    compilation target for such constructs, which makes it easier to provide
    efficient implementations of these constructs. We demonstrate these benefits by
    providing an industrial strength implementation for our IL model, by showing
    translation strategies from dynamic source-level constructs to our improved IL,
    and by analyzing the performance of the resulting IL code. Our evaluation using
    the SPEC JVM98 and Java Grande benchmarks shows that the overhead of supporting
    a dynamic deployment model can be reduced to as little as ~1.5%, when compared
    to the unmodified VM.
  }
}